Speaker A
Welcome to Startup School 2026. Now, let's get started. Please join me in welcoming to the stage the founder and CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang.
Jensen Huang shares NVIDIA's origin story, the mindset behind its success, and lessons on technology, perseverance, and innovation.
Key Takeaways
- Success requires confronting harsh realities and willingness to learn and pivot.
- Technology itself is less important than the ability to accelerate and solve algorithmic problems.
- A unique, deeply held perspective about the future is critical for building impactful companies.
- Honesty and integrity can preserve critical partnerships and company survival.
- Continuous curiosity and resilience are essential traits for founders and innovators.
Summary
- Jensen Huang discusses the early challenges NVIDIA faced, including choosing the wrong initial technology for 3D graphics.
- The company pivoted by learning from textbooks and reinventing computer graphics, becoming a world leader in the field.
- NVIDIA's core philosophy is augmenting CPUs with accelerators to solve complex algorithmic problems.
- The company expanded into multiple algorithmic domains such as particle physics, fluid dynamics, image processing, and deep learning.
- Huang emphasizes the importance of a unique perspective and deep belief in a vision for building great companies.
- He shares a pivotal story about honesty with Sega, which helped NVIDIA survive a critical financial moment.
- NVIDIA's valuation grew from $300 million at IPO in 1999 to over a trillion dollars today.
- Huang highlights the ongoing importance of learning, adaptability, and confronting reality in technology.
- He encourages founders to be prepared for hardships and to maintain curiosity and resilience.
- The talk also touches on future frontier algorithms and the evolving landscape of AI and accelerated computing.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Early NVIDIA Story
- 03:27Realizing the Wrong Technology Choice
- 05:58Expanding Algorithmic Domains and Deep Learning
- 08:49The Sega Contract and Honesty in Business
- 11:25NVIDIA's Growth and Vision
- 14:14Founder Hardships and Lessons
- 19:03Future Frontier Algorithms and AI
- 23:44Closing Thoughts and Encouragement to Founders
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
[music] [music] Hey Jerry. Thank [music] you. Please. Hey everybody. Oh my God. This is a surreal moment for me. Thank you. Thank you for being here, Jensen.
Speaker A
I'm delighted to do it. It's great to be here. [cheering] Apparently, if you're here, you are going to make it.
Speaker A
So, I'm happy I'm here. [laughter] Oh, Jensen. Uh, well, for the students who only know NVIDIA as a company at the center of AI, uh, what part of the early NVIDIA story do they most need to understand?
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But the thing that most people don't believe is that the choice of our technology that we started the company with was absolutely wrong. And so we had started with the idea that we would reinvent 3D graphics. Well, the company's
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philosophy and perspective was that the general purpose computers, the CPUs, were really useful, but if we could augment it with accelerators, we could solve problems that otherwise were too hard to solve. And one of the first problems we chose was 3D graphics. And
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during that time, 1993, the PC was just rumored to be coming. And our big idea was that we would turn every single personal computer into a game console because we grew up in the era of game consoles. And so we thought,
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you know, what if we could design a system that would fit into the personal computer and it would turn it into a game console. And so we thought we would reinvent the algorithm that would require these large supercomputers
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and we would fit it into the PC. And we came up with some new algorithms and we were excited about it. We believed in it. We reasoned about it in a thoughtful way and we went
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to start the company to go build it. Well, it turns out the algorithm was exactly wrong and the technology that founded the company turned out to be exactly wrong. And so in 1995, we realized that and
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it was almost too late because by then there were some 35 to 40 other companies that were building 3D graphics for PCs. And so we realized that it didn't work. And I went back to the company and we were at the company. I said, "What are we going
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to do? It doesn't work." And we're all talking about it. And I said, "Look, we won't have a company if we don't confront the fact that this doesn't work," and start working towards the right algorithm. And then
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somebody told me, it turns out none of us knew how to do it the right way. And not only did we choose the wrong technology, we didn't know how to do it the right way. And so that was a
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big day for me. I had a couple of $60, you know, a couple hundred dollars in my pocket. And so I went down to Fry's and I bought three textbooks. And the textbooks were about OpenGL and
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how to design OpenGL pipelines. I brought it back to the company and gave it to the engineers and here we are. We reinvented computer graphics. We're the world leader in modern computer graphics. We've invented most of the
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major breakthroughs in the last 25 years. Everybody would have thought that Nvidia started out as world leaders in 3D graphics and we learned it from a textbook and so we actually started the company, raised
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money, and bought textbooks when you think about it. And so the big lesson for me is technology is changing all the time and so long as you're able to confront the reality, so long as you are able to learn, the
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technology itself actually doesn't matter. And so since then Nvidia has been inventing all kinds of technology, all kinds of technology we've never really done before and we approach everything with the same attitude. You know, this is if it's
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important to do, we're going to go learn it. And how hard can it be? And it always turns out to be much, much harder than we expect. But you go into it with the attitude, how hard can it
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be? I mean, backstage, we were talking about how, I mean, we were talking with some of the top YC companies and you were saying that each one has an expertise in like a domain that you and Nvidia have an
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expertise in and they're all just—I forget what you said. It was like an algorithmic domain of a sort. And so it sounds like 3D graphics was merely the first of an algorithmic domain.
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That's right. And it came from a textbook. But then, you know, anyone could have read that textbook. You created particle physics, fluid dynamics.
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But you created the thing that people want, like the end product that people want to pay a lot of money for. The big idea of the company that was spot on is that it is possible to
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augment the CPU to solve problems that otherwise are too difficult to solve and molecular dynamics is one of them. Image processing is one of them.
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Inverse physics is another one. And so all kinds of different algorithms. Of course, deep learning is one of the major ones. And in order to create the company that we have today, we realized early on that it's not
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about building a great chip, it's about accelerating an algorithm domain. And so one of the things that I've always believed in is what makes great companies is a unique perspective about the world that you deeply believe in.
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It's not so much the technology, it's not so much the market, even though those things all matter. And if you have the right technology for the right market at the right time, your life is going to be a lot easier. A high-level vision
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about the future of some important thing, a perspective about it that's somehow unique that you deeply believe in and ideally pursuing that vision is hard to do. Those are kind of good combinations. In our case, we
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realized that accelerated computing was going to be important and accelerated computing turns out to be very important and our realization is everything to do with algorithm, not the chip, turns out to be exactly right.
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So, you've said a lot about, I guess, the hardships of a founder. Are there a few stories that really jump out at you?
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I mean, the people in this room would love to start a company but you know, are they really prepared for eating glass and possibly having to shut down the company, like things going wrong? What are some of the pivotal
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moments that really jump out at you? I think you were just in Japan, right? And you were sort of honoring Sega, was it? So I feel like that was a really powerful story. The project that led us
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to realize the algorithm we chose was wrong was a partnership with Sega. Sega had contracted us to build the game console after Saturn that turned out to have been Dreamcast. I don't know if anybody knows what Dreamcast is?
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Okay. So, we did not build Dreamcast. We were originally supposed to build Dreamcast, but because our algorithm and our technology was fundamentally flawed, I went to Japan and I told Madrasan, the CEO at the time, that the contract
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that they gave us was like a $12 million contract. We will not be able to fulfill it because the technology doesn't work. And I told him the reasons why and then I advised that they choose somebody else to do it. But then I
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asked him, I told him that I unfortunately still need the money and he asked me, you know, you could just imagine the conversation. So what you're telling me is what I contracted you to do you can't do,
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but you would like all the money on the contract. And I said, you got it. That's exactly right. [laughter] But obviously I was polite. I was humble. And he realized that I was honest and
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everything made sense. And if he didn't give us the money, we'd be out of business. And I think that this happens in this room. You don't invest in companies, you invest in people. And what Erdram Majri
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recognized was here's, you kno
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kept us alive and, you know, g gave me enough time to discover what to do.
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And then I guess if they held they sold it for 15 million, I heard. But yeah, they sold it the moment we went public. Uh when Nvidia went public, our valuation was $300 million.
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$300 million in 1999. That was real money. I think it's north of a trillion dollars now or so.
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It's more than a trill. Yeah. Yeah. That's wild. So, you're sort of the core, you know, we like to say that you're uh you're the man who controls the spice. Um, you know, before that, you know, I don't
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think anyone could have really predicted per se um how important uh GPUs and, you know, the technology you built would be for this AI revolution. um you know what did you see to I mean was it the accelerator and being in the right place
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right time or surely there were a lot of things that led up to that that allowed you to sort of capture this position.
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Yeah. Uh I saw AlexNet just like everybody else saw Alex Net and and um uh but remember our lens of the world my view of the world was always looking for algorithms and that algorithm the algorithm could be Nambdi the algorithm could be Vasp
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the algorithm could be OpenGL you know it could be SQL some domain specific language some algorithm and and so my lens of the world was always looking for some uh problem that we might be able to help solve. When Alexet came along, the
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algorithm was deep learning and so the question is what is this algorithm and why does it matter? Why was it so um effective and what else can it do? And and if you were to scale algorithms and scale it beyond that, what could it
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solve that otherwise you can't solve today? And the the breakthrough for us was realizing that Alexnet was not AlexNet. That alexNet was an approach with deep deep learning that allows you to learn any function. And so 15 years
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ago, I was telling everybody that, hey, guess what? We just learned the universal function approximator.
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We just discovered the universal function approximator. We can give it we could you know give it the the answer for almost any function and it could learn what the function is and for a lot of functions you don't have to be
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precise and in fact it's impossible to be precise and so most of the interesting problems are imprecise in this way and so um the day that we realize we have a universal function approximator the question then is what does that what
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does that h what does that uh do to the computing stack what does that happen into software, what are the industries that this could impact? So on so forth.
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Um almost right away we started working on computer vision. Almost right away we started working on robotics, um self-driving cars because that fundamental capability you could imagine solving some important problems in the area of computer vision and robotics. And so so I think I think the
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the big breakthrough was simply that this is much more foundational than AlexNet. This is a way of doing software and the implications to the processor, the middleware, the algorithms, the applications, you know, what I now describe as the five layer cake. Um,
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that entire industrial stack I imagine reinventing all al all together about 15 years ago. And this is simply about asking questions, reasoning about things to first principles, asking you know questions like if this then what? uh if if this can get better then so what you
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know asking all of the basic questions about about uh something that you observe uh that's really impactful I mean one of the things that really jumps out at me is to what degree you go all the way into the weeds you read
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papers you you know talk directly to the principal scientists who are sort of coming up with these things do you have any advice for people in the audience I mean that's like true founder mode and then at the same time you probably you
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have an organization and you have executives and you have people who say like here's the graph, we want to stay on this graph. You know, sometimes it ruffles feathers like do you have any advice for people about an organization
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and how you navigate that really like how do you build an org that allows you to think in first principles because if the Fortune 500 did that like the Fortune 500 will probably look a lot more like Nvidia than not and it doesn't
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like you you have built a very unique company. My state of mind when I'm my state of mind is always uh starts with curiosity.
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I have a whole bunch of questions myself and and um of course like anybody else I'll seek the shortest path to the answer. Um but often times the the answers from the people that are near me uh might not be satisfying and and I
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might have other questions and and maybe they're they're busy doing something and they're pursuing something. And so my first my first inclination is to go discover the answers to my own curiosity. Um my second is if I find
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that the information is and that the domain of information or you know particular field uh could be really important to somebody and could be important to our company. Then my next inclination is how can I learn as much
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as possible so that I could be of service to the company and share with the everybody else. You know this is no different than than you when you're you're sharing knowledge. I mean, I watch your podcasts and I watch your
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your videos and I really enjoy them. You're sharing ideas with everybody else. In a lot of ways, I think a a CEO is in service of the company, in service of all the people that are working there, and you want to empower them with
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some insight. And so, that's really where it's coming from. It's not so much a management technique, but a personality technique.
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You know, I I want to empower you, and this is something really important that I just observed. Let me tell you why it's so important. Now, part of part of having to to be near the ground and be
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in the weeds, if you will, is because oftenimes the technology is complicated or it's changing really fast. And especially when it's changing fast like like our world, um unless you have a tactile sensation of what is actually happening,
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it could either to you feel like it's just moving way too fast to understand.
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But if you understand the first principles of it over time, then everything kind of makes sense. You know, it's kind of like surfing, I would imagine. I don't know how to surf, but I can imagine it's kind of like surfing.
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You get out on the wave. To me, it looks like chaos, but to a surfer, you know, somehow they get right. They can read the waves and and uh they know how to stay on top of it. And so, I think being
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CEO is very similar to that. You know, you have to learn how to surf. And in order to learn how to surf, you have to understand the waves. you have to be able to read the wind and you have to
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have good timing and you can't have any of that unless you try and unless you actually do it. And so so partly is is um to inform myself, partly is to uh try to figure out you know what is try to
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break down the problem so that the company can learn it in a way that they can do something about. Part of it is about inspiring other people and um you know it's it's all those those basic traits of all the people in this room.
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You don't have to change your personality or your behavior uh when you become CEO. It is possible for you to continue to be yourself. And one of the things that I that I I learned a long time ago um and and I I have no idea
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where I saw this uh but but um you know the CEO or the founders, you are the you you're building a car that you are going to race. You're going to build an F1 racer, but you're going to
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build it in a way that you can drive. You should adapt the car to you. You know, somebody I think asked me, uh, you know, Jensen, if you if you don't use conventional management techniques and organizational techniques, you know,
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what's going to happen when you leave the company? Well, you know, when I die on the job, um, someday, you know, I told them they'll just have to reshape the company for the next CEO.
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And the reason that's wisdom is because we're the F1 drivers. You know, we're the racers. And the world is really competitive and we've got to stay, we've got to, you know, we got to win and we got to achieve our mission. And so,
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whatever it takes to fit the car to you, whatever it takes to fit the organization to you, that's what you ought to do. and the next CEO, whatever their personality is, they can figure it out.
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Amazing. I mean, does it does seem like um any change you make to the car will just slow you down and lose you races that you know isn't fit to you.
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Yeah. Or we're constantly tweaking the car to our needs and I'm that's really what I'm doing all the time. I'm constantly tweaking the company, constantly reshaping business processes and the way things work so that I can, you know, be more effective for the
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company. True founder mode. Yeah. Founder mode. Founder mode could scale for 34 years. That's right.
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From zero to five trillion. No evidence. No. [applause] I'd love to switch gears to like what you know what are the what are the frontier algorithms that you're most interested in now? I mean um I love that you're all the way down into material
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science, all the way up into the app level. uh you know you're the first to speak on stage about open claw and now Hermes agent um I wonder if you can sort of like walk us through a day in the
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life of like how you think about the different stages I mean going from materials to chips to data centers to even like the app level like how people are going to work like there's sort of this idea of a full stack AI factory
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well this is one of the things that that is probably going to be the most useful skill in the future. And in fact, just in listening to you talk about about technology and and you your use of it,
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you know, one of the most important things is systems understanding, systems awareness, system design, system organization, um, but systems thinking. And the reason for that is because most of the low-level things that that has to be done are going to be done
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agentically anyways. They're going to be automated anyhow. And so whether it's you know in my generation it's about compiling chips and synthesizing transistors and gates and functional blocks and and all of that is now synthesized and so most of our designers
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are systems designers. In the case of software uh most software is going to be done agentically anyhow. So you have to be much more able to think abstractly about systems. What are the what are the the problems you're trying to solve?
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What are the constraints? where you know where's where's the input where's the output you know where information coming from um what is the rate of of uh information flowing in and out of the system what are the constraints um you
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know and so is it processor is it memory is it networking you know and so understanding these uh systems problems at a sufficiently technical level is going to be very helpful to all of the people in this room and I don't think that that
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that that way of that fundamental knowledge is ever going to be useless. I think it's going to be more and more useful. And so I I try to understand systems um I the best I can. One of the
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things one of the things speaking of agents the fact of the matter is we we kind of have coursear level uh recursive self improvement already and the fact that every time you use it it improves the markdown files. uh every time you
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use it, it updates its uh long-term memory and the long-term memory is being processed either either compacted or turned into knowledge graphs or you know so on so forth. It's being improved all the time uh you know asynchronously and
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so the agent's getting smarter smarter every time. Still the problem is and this is one of the one of the problems that I think would be helpful for everybody to solve is how can we have very very specific fine grain control
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you know if not for rags if not for conditional inputs if not for our all of our prompts um directly into output was was too coarse and so the fact that we can condition the fact that we can
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control the agents um all the way down to eventually when it comes up with a And I change one word in a plan file and that one word makes a delta difference.
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Not complete difference but specific difference. Um maybe it's one pixel, maybe it's one triangle, maybe it's one component in a CAD file, maybe one layer, one via, one connection and then it regenerates everything else. I think that that level of control and that
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level of collaboration with agents will be gamechanging. We don't need the the agents to be 100% accurate, 100% high quality in order for us to use it. It could, you know, literally be 80% and then we help it the rest of the way or
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it could be 99% we help it the rest of the way. And so I I think controllability is probably the single biggest breakthrough that we need for agents at every single level. Do you think people will like I mean with
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Hermes or uh OpenClaw it feels like that might actually be somewhat existential like people should control their own personal AGI like they shouldn't outsource that app and you know have it be just in the cloud and someone else's
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agent that like kind of tells you what to do like you kind of want it to be your own.
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Yeah. Is that part of the thrust behind Nvidia being so involved? And I think well first of all I I need to understand agents because agents is the new software and how is this new software processed matters a lot to
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computer architecture and the the more intimate we are about um the nature of agents and how it's different than than um uh chat bots which is how different than than um maybe inference in the very beginning. However we think about these
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processing layers, the more intimate we are about the nature of the processing, the better we could design systems. We we kind of have to live in the future 5 to 10 years because it takes three or so years just to build a system. Takes a
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couple years to ramp it up and you're dealing and you would like them to be able to use the computer for 10 years after. So you kind of have to live in the future for a while. And so agentic
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systems for us at the first principles is just what is the workload? What's the algorithm? How is it going to evolve?
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Where are the bottlenecks? You know, where are the AMD doll's laws problems? And um how does it scale? What happens to concurrency? How do you deal with sandboxes? Um how do you deal with MCP?
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How do you deal with, you know, working memory, long-term memory? How do you have all these autonomous systems, asynchronous systems working all the time? And so what kind of design architecture makes perfect sense for that? And so we have to go and go
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discover that. Um and then of course the second thing is I want to use agents ourselves to make Nvidia go faster. And so we have, you know, Boris is in the back and and we we've got cloud code
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autonomously running in sandboxes all over Nvidia and that's really fantastic. And and uh some people use co codec, some people use cloud code, some people use cursor, some people use uh cognition and and we we let kind of a thousand
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flowers bloom, let people select the tools that they want to use and then we learn from from all of that. And so the second part is just helping the company move faster uh use the tools and the more they use it the more we're going to
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learn about um how to make it work better in the future. And and the last part is is uh discovering the the future of of um uh solutions technology for the future. And maybe you know when we when
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we saw when we saw the early versions of of chain of thought come out of Stanford this probably a decade ago at this point maybe eight years ago you know the question is is um how how effective is
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that going to be in reasoning and how scalable is going to be and what is the implication for example in computer vision if we can reason from prior knowledge and and then the big breakthrough. Of course, just in in
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thinking through that small little domain, you come to realize that maybe we don't need as much data for cars to train a self-driving car. And which led us to creating Alpameo, which is the world's first thinking self-driving car.
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And with just a million miles or so, a couple million miles, it's an incredibly great self-driving car. And the reason for that is it's kind of like us, right?
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We don't need that many miles before uh we could drive fairly well most of our lives. And the reason for that is because we have prior knowledge from our language model and we can decompose um a situation we've never seen before uh and
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um and build it up uh out of things that we understood and know very well. And so so that that's an example of seeing something and then realizing the impact some sometime later. uh when the agent systems came along it's very very clear
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that obviously a large language models uh needs memory it needs prior knowledge it needs tools it needs ways to network with other agents and so that kind of you know that once you see some early indicators uh and you're able to reason
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about the future uh helps you get a leap you know into into the future. I I feel like there's this pattern that I'm starting to see around Nvidia. It's like you see a problem, there's a new algorithm, there's some new thing
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happening, and then actually you're right there with open source. I mean, I remember when OpenClaw came out and people said it was unsafe, but you guys came out with a sandboxing sort of uh toolkit that like surrounds any harness
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and makes it safe. And so when I saw Open Claw, my first thought was, well, first of all, I I learned about it and then and then um I you know without without much imagination, you just realized we just designed the
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modern computer. This is the operating system that's going to hold a large language model. And and um in a lot of ways, Open Claw to me was very Linux moment to me.
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Yeah. And now everybody can build their own AI and I was so excited about that and we contacted Peter and um we said, "Hey, you know, all of Nvidia's engineers are your engineers." That's what I told Peter. you got this battleship outside
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your house. You you uh uh you know break down the problem as you desire and we'll contribute as as you wish. Uh same thing with the the uh the Hermes team, you know, and I'm so excited about the work
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that they're doing. I I I do think that the world needs uh the ability for everybody to build their own AI. And you could you could of course and I encourage everybody to to uh use cloud services as much as possible. Everybody
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should use chatgbt and claude and right everybody should use that and um but if you if you need to build your own AI because you're a company and and um you need to build your own domain specific AIs now you have Hermes and you have
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open claw you've got all kinds of you got lang chain uh deep agent you got all these different ways right to build your own AI and it's it's quite frankly relatively easy because the software is smart you know and so AI is smart and
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therefore AI must be so smart you could adapt it easily. And so I I think that that um we want we want to encourage everybody and every company to build their own AIs and and um and who knows
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what innovation will come from the fact that it's open source. I feel like all the alpha is in building your own AI. I mean if someone else is using whatever is uh off the shelf but you're you have a thing that can
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recursively self-improve and it is you know I mean the mechan people are very flippant about markdown files. They say like, "Oh, haha, it's just text." But like text is intelligence and uh we're in a different way.
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Words are thoughts. Yeah. Yeah. Words are thoughts. Yeah. And it turns out you can try to try to think without words.
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Yeah. [laughter] So, switching gears again, I mean, a lot of people are anytime you move the cheese, people get a little worried. Um, intelligence is going to be on tap, which is really awesome. I think it bodess well for everyone in this room.
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Um what do you think changes about the economy? What do you think you know happens in sort of a broader sense?
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Uh obviously what I'm going to say is uneven. Uh there are some uh you know we're going to automate tasks. We're going to automate cognitive tasks. If that task is uh somebody makes a phone call and and sends a bunch of words you
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know across the phone to you and your job is to provide a response and and um if all the information is at your fingertip because you you have all the database here and you should be able to to answer that question completely uh in
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that case that task will be automated away. Okay, ignoring that for a second. Not that not that you not that we we ignored this, but my my point is I'm going to answer the question about about really the great opportunity. And so u
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many tasks will be automated away. Uh many jobs every single job will be will change and there'll be a whole bunch of new jobs. And that that that I think we know. Um the bottom line is this. The
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evidence would show that and it makes perfect sense that AI and automation is creating jobs everywhere.
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The narrative about AI destroying jobs is exactly backwards. AI eliminate tasks. AI automates tasks away, but it doesn't necessarily doesn't necessarily eliminate jobs. And the reason for that is because the the job of a person has a purpose and that purpose has many tasks.
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Some of those tasks could be automated away. Many of those tasks cannot be. And so the evidence suggests that here we are we've automated coding which is a task but the job of a software engineer appears to be growing. Right? The number
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of software engineer jobs year-over-year has increased 10%. The task of reading radiology scans has been automated but the number of radiology jobs has increased some 20% in the last several years even though AI has taken over the whole field. And the
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reason for that is because the backlog of patients is incredibly high. Now doctors and hospitals could admit a lot more patients. In order to admit a lot more patients you need more nurses, more radiologists. And so the same thing with
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software we the backlog of ideas the backlog of ambition and aspiration is so high that if we can automate away t the task of programming we could hire more software engineers to do more things we could be more ambitious. Same
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thing all you know just across the board. Uh they said Harvey is going to eliminate all of the parallegal jobs and the number of lawyers will be reduced.
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Turns out parallegals are growing like crazy and the reason for that is because the backlog of lawsuits is really high and now these law firms could get a lot more cases through in order to do so you got to hire more people and so this is a
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classic classic example of productivity increasing growth increasing growth drives more employment this the reason why there's more employment today than there was when I first came out of school so we've been talking a lot about software and agents Um, another really
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exciting thing that Nvidia is all the way out on the edge on is actually physical robots. Um, you know, how far out? I think in the past you might have even said, um, this as soon as this year, what's the latest thinking on, you
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know, when can we expect practical robotics? Yeah. The moment that I saw us generating video, that was that was a great moment for me.
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The moment that I and I start I saw us generating video. I mean, we did the original work on um auto uh progressive GANs, okay? And we did the original work on uh conditional GANs um long before the first videos were generated outside
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that people saw um a couple of years earlier inside our labs. We were driving a a uh simulator completely generated by video and computer completely generated by neural networks. And so the moment I saw us generating articulation, if I can generate video of a finger
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moving, if I could generate video of a hand picking up a glass, why can't I cause a robot to do the same? And so the moment I saw that generative AI happening, I realized that robotics articulation was around the corner. And
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so now the question is you know how is the robot going to understand uh uh to generate motions that obey the laws of physics. How's it how does it understand causality? Um how does it understand you know friction tension? How does it
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understand the laws of physics? And so it started us down the journey of creating what we call physical AI now and everybody calls it physical AI.
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physical AI. We started working on world foundation model um an AI that understands the laws of physics and how the world works and um we started down the the journey of of uh working on robotics. I would say the chat GPT
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moment of robots happened a couple years ago already. Wow. And and the reason for that is remember when chat GPT first came out, it didn't do anything productive.
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It didn't do anything useful, but it opened our imagination about what's possible. And I would say a couple of years ago, you know, robots walking around that we could do reinforcement learning, fine-tune it for and ground it in physics, uh really happened a couple
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years ago. So now what what do we need to do? We need to do all the same things that we're doing now for agentic systems. We have to create environments for them to learn in to eval.
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And so we have to do real to sim to create environments. Uh we have to do uh uh we have to generate simulators that are based on simulation grounded physics simulation as well as generative uh physics simulations. And so Isaac sim
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cosmos and all the work that we do in that area is related to simulation. And then the last part is sim to real. And so uh that part is has something to do with reinforcement learning um uh grounding it on physics grounding
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grounding on on um all the electromechanical uh systems that that robots require. And so but these three basic system I think builds up uh the eval if you will the the the the post-training of um of robotics. And I I think we're we're
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going to see it right around the corner. Amazing. Where does physical AI show up first in a way that's really economically real? Are you seeing that already?
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We conjectured that uh that robotics was going to come along and decided that the first application of robotics that has both a large enough market um relatively standardized technology so that we could scale and get the flywheel going um and has real economic value was
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uh self-driving cars. And so, uh, inside Whimo, uh, our chips from Nvidia, uh, at at Tesla, we were in the car. Now we're in the data center. Um, Mercedes, we're in the data center, we're in the car, we're the software stack. Uh, we, uh,
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worked on Alpamo and we open sourced it. And the reason why we open sourced the self-driving car stack is because you need it for agriculture, you need it for mail delivery, you need it for warehouse AMRs. There's so many different ways
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that you could apply um uh autonomous navigation. Uh and none of those markets are big enough to be a self-driving car market. And we thought it was s sufficiently diverse that we would create the whole stack for it. And so
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we're working with autonomous vehicles in all kinds of different places. Our robotics business, autonomous vehicle business, basically physical AI business is probably almost it's like10 billion dollars. So it's really really big already. Um likely this will be one of
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the largest industries in the world and um uh it'll take longer than a couple two three years. It'll take less than 10 and so this will this will be our next hundred billion dollar business.
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Amazing. Um I want to take a moment uh I think this is the exact right crowd to uh you know maybe as a arena we can welcome Jensen to X. Welcome to X. I mean you made your first post uh and
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thank you for your leadership. [applause] You know, that that just sh that shows you how introverted I am. It took me until 2026 to have the first post on X.
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You know, it's I'm probably the last human on earth that that did it. But but uh what I posted was too important to me and too important to the to the industry and too important to the world. And so
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so I I I over overcame my um my shyness and and put my first thing out on X.
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No, thank you for your leadership. I mean open source open weights open source models are incredibly important for I mean what all of us in this room want to do like we want to create if not for open source the mobile cloud
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industry would have never happened. If not for open, if not for Linux, if not for Kubernetes, if not for all of these, you know, platform, if not for uh TensorFlow or more important uh PyTorch, right? The and the early versions of it,
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Cafe, right? Torch, I mean all of the uh Theaniano, remember the early versions of all those were all open sourced. If not for all of that, how would we have modern AI?
Speaker A
Well, thank you for your leadership and your voice is incredibly important here. Thank you. Thank you. [applause] Before [applause] we go, I feel like we I just really resonate with your story. I think that everyone here I mean would love the
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wisdom of you know your journey coming here. I mean what should a young person learn now given all the things that you're seeing all the algorithms that are going to take hold in society? Um what should a young person learn now
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that will still matter based on what you're seeing? Well, some of the things that I saw today and some of the starters I met today was really really quite quite um encouraging and and and the thing that that um the big takeaway
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is of course the simple stuff is going to get automated away and when I say simple stuff I mean software you know coding the idea that you would you would do a you would solve a problem by sitting in
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front of a computer and you're you're you're actually writing you writing code that concept is obviously going to get automated away. Um, you know, in my generation when I was when I was growing up, we had to do long
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division. I mean, for God's sakes, who has to learn long division, you know, and so that got coded away that got automated away. And so, I think the simple stuff is going to get automated away. the hard problems, the hard
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sciences um physics chemistry biology, uh, you know, computer science, uh, computer engineering, systems thinking, uh, you know, all and and particularly the domains that are intersecting. Uh, those hard problems will never go away. And so AI is just an
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incredible tool that helps us become even more ambitious, even more um impatient about solving these extraordinarily large and incredibly hard problems uh than before. And so you know if you if you look at my generation when I first graduated
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a chip designer would design a chip with maybe a thousand transistors and that would be a very large chip. You know now designing a trillion transistor chips is not even you know if somebody would have told me Jensen our next chip is a
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trillion transistor I said okay you know it's not a thing and the reason for that is because we are so ambitious now the the the scale of the problem the scale of the task is no longer a matter and so
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you don't have to worry about about you know how much coding how many engineers you don't have to you don't have to think about those things anymore you just have to think about what is the what is the
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problem you have to solve. And so I think that the deep deep tech stuff, the deep science stuff, uh understanding understanding the intersection between technology and social issues, um understanding market gaps and and holes uh opportunities. I think all of that
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still exists. Um and and the better you are at systems thinking so that you could orchestrate millions of agents solving problems autonomously, the better off you are. And so that's why system thinking is going to be so important. But otherwise, I think the
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world's going to continue to have a lot of great challenges for us to solve. Go to school the same old way. You know, stay in school.
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Stay in school. [applause] I guess um I usually like to end with um you're looking out on the crowd. There are a lot of people who uh I mean I started this uh the opener with like I honestly look in the crowd and I see
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people who are not different than us per se. You know we actually just are technical and like love systems.
Speaker A
How you know thank you. What thank you. what advice would you give to uh this room of you know and do you do you see yourself in this in this room and like I'm curious what you would say
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if you could send a uh telegram a message to the 18 to 22-year-old version of yourself what would that be I could tell you exactly how I felt when I first when Nvidia first founded and and uh the three of us started um the
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the thing I felt at the time is there There was so much for me to know and so much for me to learn and I didn't know it and I was telling you earlier there at the time there was there were no
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YouTube there's you know no YC nobody's teaching you how to start a company and so I went to the bookstore and I bought a book and the book said how to start a company unfortunately the book was like 500
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pages long and and so I you know I figured by the time I read it you know I'd be out of business and Lori and I'd be out of money and so there's noense since reading it. Um, but the thing that
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the thing I remember very very vividly is that how scared I was uh to go raise money because I felt that I was about to talk to a bunch of people and I didn't know how to answer their questions and
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um and it's true and I barely know how to answer their questions even today.
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Uh, but the thing that I learned is um none of that stuff matters as it turns out. And and you're always going to have things that you don't know. And every single day, the world is changing.
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Technology is changing. Obviously, this is the greatest time in the last 60 years to start a company. The whole industry has changed. It's a complete reset from a technology perspective. the single most important technology in human history, the computer, has been
Speaker A
completely reset. And so this is absolutely the single greatest time to start a company. And I'm I'm I'm jealous of all of you uh and and uh and the opportunities you have ahead. I mean, it's going to be incredible. So, it's
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the perfect time on the one hand. On the other hand, the technology is changing so fast. And so, the question is, what's the right feeling for you? And eventually, and I told you the story of us of me buying the other book, the
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textbook, I think the psychology and the feeling that I have today on all of the new experiences and a new technology and new markets and new dynamics, I look at it and I say, "This is important. I've got to go learn it and
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I've got to go do something about it and I better get to it as fast as I can. And how hard can it be?" I always had this feeling, how hard can it be?
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And truth be told, it is way harder than you think. And but you you don't want your mind to be to be there. You want your mind to be how hard can it be? And let the suffering come to you
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a little bit at a time. you know, don't don't imagine how hard it's going to be and let all of that turn into anxiety and not doing something about it. You want to imagine your head, how hard can
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it be? You know, I got a whole bunch of a I got a bunch of AI agents helping me anyways. And so, how hard can it be? And then you get going on working on it. And so, that's probably the the attitude of
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an entrepreneur. You you know, you have to learn a bunch of stuff along the way.
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you believe in your ability to learn which is you know learning is the single greatest superpower and if you go into it with the attitude how hard can it be if anybody can do it I can do it and
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just realize that it will be hard and you just have to have the resilience to overcome it every single day you don't have to overcome life in one day you just have to overcome that morning that morning you know you have to overcome
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today today and so it's not a big deal just get through today wait till right?
Speaker A
Work towards tomorrow. Keep following your dreams and the rest of everything if you stick if you stick with it long enough, you know, and video happens. And so, you know, I think the the wisdom that I can if there's anything is resilience is
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probably the single most important thing. And if you believe in something just get going on it and uh get your mind uh you know out of out of uh keeping your yourself from pursuing it because of you know fear or anxiety or
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lack of confidence or whatever it is and that you're just going to tell yourself I'm going to learn my way there. Dance along everybody.
Speaker A
All right guys, thank you. Thank you so much. That was incredible. Thank you guys.
Topics:NVIDIAJensen HuangStartup School3D graphicsaccelerated computingdeep learningAIfounder mindsettechnology innovationentrepreneurship
