Jensen Huang Living the Rock Star Life

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By C. Rich

Lex Fridman just put out a 90-minute video called “Visiting Taiwan w/ Jensen Huang,” and I watched the whole thing. Lex flew to Taipei for Computex, the giant computer trade show, and spent several days trailing the founder and CEO of Nvidia through convention halls, a company party, two night markets, and a Taiwanese breakfast. On paper it’s a tech story. Really, it’s a food show that happens to explain why the modern world runs on one small island. And somewhere between the oyster pancakes and the pig’s feet, it shows you a culture that treats engineers the way we treat pop stars.

Start with the food, because the show does. At the Raohe night market, they eat the famous oyster pancake, spicy noodles, pork sausage, shaved ice, and little fried sweet potato balls, “empty on the inside, crunchy on the outside.” At lunch there’s braised pig’s feet, which everyone agrees has a branding problem and tastes great. At the Ningxia night market it’s a Taiwanese take on the corn dog, ice cream rolled up in a thin wrapper with cilantro and peanuts, pork floss, grass jelly, green mango, and durian, the fruit that smells like a crime scene and tastes like dessert.

Breakfast is hot and cold soy milk, fried dough sticks for dunking, and sticky rice wrapped around pork floss and egg. They also have a word for that bouncy, chewy texture in a good noodle or fish ball. It’s “Q,” or “QQ,” and it’s a compliment. We don’t have a word for that. We have “al dente,” and we borrowed it.

Then came the part that stopped me cold. At dinner, the dishes keep coming. Say three, and you get four. Eat everything, and the hosts feel they have to bring more. “It’s not a winnable game.” Then comes the explanation: “Depending on the culture, if you don’t eat everything, it’s rude. And in some cultures, if you eat everything, it’s rude. So you’re either competing for their generosity or competing for your appreciation for their food.” And in Taiwan, “their generosity is more important than your appreciation for the food.”

Think about that. Here, a clean plate means “great meal, thank you.” There, it can mean “you didn’t feed me enough.” Same empty plate, opposite message. Lex, being Lex, calls it an optimization problem. You have to figure out the objective function based on which country you’re in. Only an engineer could turn a dinner party into a math problem, and only in Taiwan would the table nod along.

Now to the rock star part, and I mean that literally. Everywhere Jensen goes, there are crowds. People scream his name. They ask him to sign things, including a FIRST Robotics challenge poster. Someone jokes about 3D-printing a statue of him. On the trade-show floor, someone compares him to the Beatles in the ’60s, and right on camera comes the comeback: “Except the Beatles actually had talent.” One afternoon, several thousand people were lined up waiting for him. At the Nvidia party, he walks out and hands food to the press, because they’ve been working all day and, as somebody put it, they need love too.

Lex sums it up nicely: “It’s really inspiring to see an engineer be treated like a rock star, ’cause engineers build the world, and they don’t often get the love I think they deserve.” Then there’s the line that tells you everything. A woman who grew up in Taiwan told Lex, “As a girl, I learned how to spell CoWoS before I could spell Gucci.” CoWoS is a TSMC chip-packaging technology. That’s the coolest thing a little girl in Taipei can spell.

Now compare that to home. Our cult of personality runs on some of the most vacuous, untalented people imaginable, worshiped by millions. Pop stars with forgettable songs. We fill stadiums for people who couldn’t change a tire, then complain that the country can’t build anything. We get the heroes we pay attention to, and our attention has questionable taste.

It goes deeper than celebrities. Over here, our politicians are politicians. Over there, the people steering the ship have often been engineers and scientists. Jensen traces Taiwan’s whole chip industry back to a man named K. T. Li, a physicist who became Taiwan’s economics and finance minister and had a vision back in the ’50s to bring science and technology manufacturing to the island. That vision pulled Morris Chang home to found TSMC, the factory that makes the most advanced chips on Earth. Across the strait, China’s last three top leaders all studied engineering: Jiang Zemin in electrical engineering, Hu Jintao in hydraulic engineering, and Xi Jinping in chemical engineering. You can argue about what they did with it. But the culture picks its heroes from the people who build things. That is a different world.

So what is a chip, and why does anyone care? Think of a computer chip as a city of billions of tiny light switches, each one far smaller than a speck of dust, flipping on and off billions of times a second. The way those switches are wired together is what turns electricity into thinking. A graphics chip, or GPU, is a special kind of city. Instead of a few very smart switches doing one job at a time, it has thousands of simpler workers all doing math at once. That turns out to be perfect for drawing video game explosions, and, as luck would have it, for training artificial intelligence. Lex says this one island makes more than 90 percent of the most advanced chips in the world. Every smartphone, every AI data center, runs through Taiwan.

Which brings us to Nvidia, a story that sounds made up. Jensen co-founded it in 1993 to make graphics chips for PC gamers. He tells Lex how, as a nobody startup, he called TSMC’s U.S. office and got a recording. He called again and again, and nobody called back, so he wrote Morris Chang a long letter. A long time later, around 6:30 one evening, the phone rang: “This is Morris Chang from TSMC.” Out in the hallway, his employees were screaming over the original PlayStation. “Hey, guys, shut up,” he told them. That partnership has run for 30 years.

Then it turned out the chips built for video games were just what AI needed, and the toy company became the engine of the AI age. As of the market close on October 16, Nvidia was worth about $5.2 trillion. That makes it the most valuable company on the planet, though Apple is breathing down its neck. Jensen hasn’t forgotten where he started: “Oh, I love the gamers. That’s where we all begin… No matter how high you are, don’t let your feet leave the ground.”

Now for some high-end pondering, the long view. Math, physics, and biology might be cooked by AI. But the ability to take all of that and shape it into something that moves humanity forward cannot be replaced by AI. AI works from what we already know. You won’t be getting a brand-new theory of mathematics from it. You’ll get what math is now, served faster. New ideas come from people, and the people who turn ideas into things are called engineers. If machines handle the calculating, then the human who knows what to build, and why, becomes worth more, not less. Taiwan seems to have figured that out. We’re still busy voting on talent shows.

The irony is thick enough to need a knife. The most valuable company in America was built on chips made by a culture that worships the people Americans forget to thank. Maybe that’s the lesson from a night market. Eat what they hand you, but don’t clean your plate, and whatever you do, learn to spell CoWoS before Gucci.

I wrote all of this before the scandal involving Jensen Huang erupted into the headlines. None of this changes my admiration for what Taiwan has accomplished or what Jensen Huang has built. His personal conduct and the questions surrounding national security deserve scrutiny, but neither erases three decades of engineering achievement. What it does illustrate is something humanity has been remarkably slow to learn: We have a habit of turning extraordinary people into extraordinary idols, only to discover that they remain ordinary human beings with ordinary human weaknesses. Perhaps that is the real distinction worth making.

We should celebrate the engineers, scientists, and inventors who build civilization without confusing their accomplishments with sainthood. Jensen Huang may have helped build the technological foundation of the artificial intelligence revolution, but even the man whose company builds the world’s most sophisticated computing machinery can apparently make some spectacularly poor calculations. The engineering may be revolutionary. The human operating the machinery is still running some very old software. Still, a good time to buy Nvidia stock while it craters, money to be made there, but you better move fast.