> He happened to be running the biggest GPU company during the biggest GPU boom ever.

Bruh. He is a co-founder and he led that GPU company to a position where it can produce the best GPUs on the market that power the whole industry. You are making it sound as if he happened to be there by accident. This is ridiculous.

Can you please make your substantive points without swipes? Your comment would be fine without the "Bruh", "You are making it sound as if", and "This is ridiculous." bits.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's easy to dismiss someone's life's work when you aren't the one in their shoes.

> This would happen even if the counterfactual CEO was incompetent.

Tell that to Intel's ex-CEO.

Isn't he the entire reason Nvidia invested so heavily in tensor cores before AI even became a massive market mover? He definitely deserves credit for setting Nvidia up with a massive lead in this emergent industry.

I feel like it's worth repeating that he gets credit for the decisions he has made, while it's also true that someone else would also see this demand, maybe earlier maybe later, and that the economy and shareholders would benefit. The point I'm making, and I think the one you're responding to, is that he didnt do something so magical that wouldn't have been done otherwise. It's a counterpoint to "this guy did so much, we would be nothing without him" and using that as a way to excuse his bad decisions.

Again, credit for putting yourself in the position to capitalize. Credit for executing. But it's pretty likely that the world would not be substantially different if Nvidia has been another company and Jensen was some guy working at MS.

I think the Tensor decision was very impactful to both the direction of AI tech and Nvidia as a company, though. I can't judge how much of the decision to invest in that technology was his but assuming he had a significant proportion of influence in that decision, he deserves a significant portion of the credit. A different person in the same position might not have seen the potential of machine learning at scale and not been willing to point their GPUs at the problem.

Not really. Nvidias gpu architecture was tensor.. It is useful for other things like AI. That wasn't a decision to create AI other than it was what they had. They landed on their feet. They didn't invest in pickaxes, they had the right pickaxe at the right time.

It isn't like he is the one who did the research to lead to that decision though. That just isn't his job. He isn't an analyst. He is CEO, who reads reports or sat in presentations made by his analysts, whatever their specific position titles, who are really the ones who did the work weighing and making this decision. His role was to say yes to these people whose job it is to actually figure this out.

So indeed, if he was not CEO, likely whoever would have been would be given the same information as Jensen that lead to him saying yes on tensor cores. And in all likelihood, the same exact decision would have been made, or at least a coinflips odds chance if it really were a matter of "yes" or "no" with no clear winner.

My experience in corporate America is that, no - it would NOT be likely that a different CEO makes the same call.

Many, especially the "non-founder" CEOs, are risk-averse.

There's likely many CUDA-like ideas from internal engineers shot-down or ignored by leadership at companies like Microsoft, Google, etc.

While Tim Cook certainly drove the valuation of Apple up during his tenure, one of the most common criticisms was that Apple stopped innovating and more recently their quality bar has been dropping.