The New Yorker Radio Hour
Why the Tech Giant Nvidia May Own the Future. Plus, Joshua Rothman on Taking A.I Seriously
04 Apr 2025
The microchip maker Nvidia is a Silicon Valley colossus. After years as a runner-up to Intel and Qualcomm, Nvidia has all but cornered the market on the parallel processors essential for artificial-intelligence programs like ChatGPT. “Nvidia was there at the beginning of A.I.,” the tech journalist Stephen Witt tells David Remnick. “They really kind of made these systems work for the first time. We think of A.I. as a software revolution, something called neural nets, but A.I. is also a hardware revolution.” In The New Yorker, Stephen Witt profiled Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s brilliant and idiosyncratic co-founder and C.E.O. His new book is “The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip.” Until recently, Nvidia was the most valuable company in the world, but its stock price has been volatile, posting the largest single-day loss in history in January. But the company’s story is only partially a business story; it’s also one about global superpowers, and who will decide the future. If China takes military action against Taiwan, as it has indicated it might, the move could wrest control of the manufacturing of Nvidia microchips from a Taiwanese firm, which is now investing in a massive production facility in the U.S. “Maybe what’s happening,” Witt speculates, is that “this kind of labor advantage that Asia had over the United States for a long time, maybe in the age of robots that labor advantage is going to go away. And then it doesn’t matter where we put the factory. The only thing that matters is, you know, is there enough power to supply it?” Plus, the staff writer Joshua Rothman has long been fascinated with A.I.—he even interviewed its “godfather,” Geoffrey Hinton, for The New Yorker Radio Hour. But Rothman has become increasingly concerned about a lack of public and political debate over A.I.—and about how thoroughly it may transform our lives. “Often, if you talk to people who are really close to the technology, the timelines they quote for really reaching transformative levels of intelligence are, like, shockingly soon,” he tells Remnick. “If we’re worried about the incompetence of government, on whatever side of that you situate yourself, we should worry about automated government. For example, an A.I. decides the length of a sentence in a criminal conviction, or an A.I. decides whether you qualify for Medicaid. Basically, we’ll have less of a say in how things go and computers will have more of a say.”Rothman’s essay “Are We Taking A.I. Seriously Enough?” appears in his weekly column, Open Questions.
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Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. NVIDIA is a tech colossus. It's as potentially important to the way we live our lives in the near future as Apple or Google. Maybe even more so. NVIDIA makes microchips. In fact, it's all but cornered the market on the chips that are essential for the use of AI, for artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT.
And just recently, it was rated the most valuable company ever. But this is not primarily a business story. It's a story about the United States and China, about who exactly is building the technology that shapes the future, our future. About a year ago, journalist Stephen Witt wrote a stunning portrait in The New Yorker of NVIDIA and its co-founder, Jensen Huang.
Witt's new book on the subject is called The Thinking Machine. Stephen, in all the years we've been doing this show, I don't think we've ever sat down to talk about a microchip company and the CEO of that microchip company. And yet, NVIDIA is incredibly important to all of our futures in some way or another. Explain what NVIDIA is and why it's so important.
When you interact with a system like ChatGPT, like say everyone's rendering their image right now as Studio Ghibli kind of anime, it takes your request and it sends it back through a giant broadband data pipe to a huge data center. And inside that data center is a warehouse full of computing equipment, all of which is running NVIDIA microchips. It's all running NVIDIA hardware.
Your request is processed there and then sent back to you in the form of an image or a term paper or a meme or a medical diagnosis or whatever you asked for. NVIDIA was there at the beginning of AI. They really kind of made these systems work for the first time. We think of AI as a software revolution, something called neural nets. But AI is also a hardware revolution.
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