Nvidia CEO Wishes Stanford Students ‘Ample Doses of Pain and Suffering’; watch the video

Co-founder and CEO of Nvidiathe new artificial intelligence giant that has become the third most valuable company in the United States, Jensen Huang said he wished “large doses of pain and suffering” to students at Stanford University in California during a lecture at the institution.

According to the American businessman, who was born in Taiwan and spent part of his childhood in Thailand, one of his advantages in his career was to have “very low expectations”. And, on the contrary, the vast majority of students at Stanford, a traditional university near San Francisco and a great producer of Silicon Valley workers, have “very high expectations”, as they are in one of the main educational institutions in the world and have money to pay for their studies.

“People with very high expectations have very little resilience. And, unfortunately, resilience matters for success,” he said during the March 8 seminar. “I hope you get suffering.”

The importance of resilience

Jensen Huang, founder of Nvidia, wishes suffering and pain to Stanford students. pic.twitter.com/ijWyGb4vAX

— Daniel Haddad (@DanielNHaddad) March 23, 2024

“To this day I use the phrase with great joy: pain and suffering within our company,” he said. “Because you want to refine the character of your company. You want greatness from them (your employees). And greatness is not intelligence. Greatness comes from character,” she said.

The entrepreneur then completed his reasoning by saying that greatness “is made by people who have suffered”. “I wish all of you Stanford students ample doses of pain and suffering,” he concluded.

Nvidia

Chipmaker Nvidia has been one of the biggest winners of the tech boom. TO THE, and became, as of early March, a company with a market value of more than $2 trillion. Therefore, has surpassed Alphabet in terms of market value, owner of Google, becoming the third largest company by market value in the United States, behind Microsoft and Apple. The company’s valuation at the time was $1.8 trillion.

Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and has since served as president, CEO and member of the board of directors. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

For any AI to work, a huge amount of data is needed. These, in turn, require state-of-the-art IT infrastructure to process the information.

In 1999, Nvidia began developing video processing chips (or GPUs) for computers and video games. GPUs, created to accelerate graphics processing in parallel with CPUs (central processing units, which perform tasks sequentially and with greater energy consumption), have evolved to power the machines on which the neural networks that power the computer run. ‘artificial intelligence.

Nvidia currently sells the H100 GPU, which in addition to promising an exceptional visual experience for gamers, has been optimized to handle huge volumes of data, making it a more efficient option for training AI models.

Each costs starting at $20,000, and companies need thousands of units. Earlier this year, Marco Zuckerberg announced the purchase of 350,000 H100 GPUs to develop artificial intelligence models Objective.

The H100 is four times faster than its predecessor, the A100, at training large language models (LLMs) and responding to user commands.

Huang was responsible for shifting focus from gaming chips to AI-focused chips. Thanks to this pioneering spirit, the hardware provided by the company has become the market standard, and several researchers, startups and tech giants create innovations with the company’s AI semiconductors.

As a result, Nvidia has become the undisputed leader in the semiconductor industry for artificial intelligence. According to data from specialized consultancy Omdia, the brand holds 70% of the market share of AI chips.