Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang discussed the impacts of AI in a keynote speech at the National Taiwan University in Taipei.
His message to individuals and businesses was to take advantage of AI now or risk being left behind.
“Agile companies will take advantage of AI and boost their position. Companies less so will perish,” he told students at the National Taiwan University.
Last week, Nvidia knocked on the door of the ‘$1 trillion club’, with a market value of approximately $950 billion. The five current members are Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Saudi Aramco.
For comparison, Intel, which dominated the chip market for years, is valued at $114 billion.
Huang offered little consolation for those whose jobs are threatened by AI, “While some worry that AI may take their jobs, someone who is expert with AI will.” He didn’t warn about AI or offer a word of caution like other tech leaders in recent weeks.
“In 40 years, we created the PC, Internet, mobile, cloud, and, now, the AI era. What will you create? Whatever it is, run after it like we did. Run, don’t walk,” Huang said. “Either you are running for food, or you are running from becoming food.”
2023 is the “perfect” year to graduate
Huang told students that 2023 was the perfect year to graduate, drawing parallels with his own graduation in 1984 when the Apple Macintosh kickstarted the personal computing revolution. He said graduates are joining the job market just as AI has “reinvented computing from the ground up. In every way this is the rebirth of the computer industry.”
Huang offered insights from Nvidia’s early days, discussing a situation where they realized their chips were technically poor but had already received a large order from Sega. They needed Sega to pay them in full, to which the CEO agreed. Had they disagreed, Nvidia may have ceased to be.
The AI boom has driven Nvidia’s tremendous surge in value. Their A100 and H100 chips are valuable components of many top AI firms’ hardware stacks, not just in the US but in China and Taiwan, too.
Nvidia’s growth has occurred irrespective of US trade embargoes on Chinese exports, where the company strategically re-designed some of its chips to comply with restrictions.
