#494 – Jensen Huang: NVIDIA – The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution
Episode publishedPodcast: Lex Fridman PodcastLex Fridman Podcast
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The following is a conversation with Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, one of the most important and influential companies in the history of human civilization. NVIDIA is the engine powering the AI revolution, and a lot of its success can be directly attributed to Jensen's sheer force of will and his many brilliant bets and decisions as a leader, engineer, and innovator. And now a quick few second mention of his sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfreedman.com/sponsors. It is in fact the best way to support this podcast. We got Shopify for selling stuff online, Element for electroly
Yeah. Thanks for that question. So first of all, the reason why extreme codesign is necessary is because the problem no longer fits inside one computer to be accelerated by one GPU. The problem that you're trying to solve is you would like to go faster than the number of computers that you add. So you added, you know, 10,000 computers, but you would like it to go a million times faster. Then all of a sudden, you have to take the algorithm. You have to break up the algorithm. You have to refactor it. You have to shard the pipeline. You have to shard the data. You have to shard the model. Now al
I'm sure there's trade offs there. Plus, have a complete disparate disciplines here. I'm sure you have specialists in each one of these high bandwidth memory, the the networking, the NVLink, the NICs, the the optics and the copper that you're doing, the power delivery, the cooling, all of that. I mean, there's, like, world experts in each of those. How do you get them in a room together to figure
out my staff is so large.
What's the pro can you take me through the process of the specialists and the journalists? Like, how do you put together the rack when you know this the set of things you have to shove into a rack together? Yeah. Like, what does that process look like of designing it altogether?
There's the the first question, which is what is extreme codesign? You're you were optimizing across the entire stack of software from architectures to chips to systems to system software to the algorithms to the applications. That's one layer. The second thing that you and I just talked about is goes beyond CPUs and GPUs and networking chips and scale up switches and scale out switches. And then, of course, you gotta include power and cooling and all of that because, you know, all these computers are extremely extremely power power hungry. They do a lot of work, and they're very energy effici
So you still have 60 reports. You still have a Yeah. More. Yeah. And most stars at least have a foot in engineering. Almost all of them.
There's experts in memory. There's experts in CPUs. There's experts in optical. All all yeah. GPUs and architecture, algorithms, design.
So you constantly have an eye on the entire stack, and you're having to do, like, intense discussions about the design of the entire stack.
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