Great interview with Jensen Huang
Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia was interviewed by Axios. In the wide ranging interview he is advocating for open LLM models. He thinks that the benefits of closed models ties in with the benefits of scale and convenience from cloud computing infrastructure. Jensen Huang also talks about sovereign AI at an enterprise level as well as country level.
What struck me was Huang’s strong advocacy for open source and open models. He points to the central role that Linux plays today. (Android is Linux as is Google Chrome, macOS, iOS, iPadOS and tvOS all run on Darwin which is open source and relies on BSD and the Mach micro-kernel – which are also open source). He points out that open source allows inspection, customisation to harden the software and ultimately be trusted.
It one of the best interviews that I have seen where Jensen Huang is at his most articulate. It’s also interesting that the interview is so wide ranging. Huang’s last point about now being the most important time, gave me a moment for pause. Huang’s time is mediated by his staff rather than by outlook or his watch. But it also made me wonder about the nature of strategy and horizon-scanning at Nvidia.
The interview was published at a time when the media realised that Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 as an open model was competitive with US frontier models on many measures.
Contrast Huang’s viewpoint with Palantir CEO Alex Karp on CNBC. Karp discussed a growing unhappiness amongst US enterprises about the cost of accessing models from large AI companies, yet receiving ‘no value’ from the technology.
Surfing the wave
Kind of a tangential point to to Huang’s the most important time is now is about timing in technological innovation. Robert X Cringely in his book Accidental Empires made this point through the use of surfing as an analogy. If you hit a wave too early, you wipe out, if you hit the wave too late the momentum and energy has gone out of the wave. Hitting it at the right time the most important factor. It’s a timeless truth.
Film maker David Hoffman documented behind the scenes at General Magic as part of the process to make a launch video for their product. General Magic were too early to the wave as this behind the scenes footage shows.
Ladders
I like Justin Taylor’s videos because of their insightful content delivered in a snarky slacker way. In this video he uses ladders to illustrate the importance of supply chains and logistics to support US air power. Which explains why the US is restricted to predictable bases in the current Iranian conflict amongst other things.