I am not a cynical person by nature. I fully understand how the trillion dollar tech industry works. I know it never pays to say anything negative about a customer who wants to spend countless dollars more. But sometimes, just sometimes, a CEO will decide to say something that just makes me go “Oh, come on! Really?” and in an interview with a technology investment firm, Nvidia’s boss did just that.
The statement in question can be heard in an excerpt of the interview broadcast by X-channel StockMKTNewz (via Wccftech) when Jen-Hsun Huang was asked about his thoughts on xAI’s recent expansion of its Colossus supercomputer build, which took just 17 days to complete complete.
“Just building a massive factory, liquid-cooled, powered, allowed in the short amount of time it was done… I mean, it’s like superhuman. And as far as I know, there’s only one person in the world who could do that , I mean, Elon is unique in this understanding of engineering and engineering and large systems, and it’s incredible,” Huang said.
Really? Only one person in the world? Just one? Of course, the teams involved do deserves huge admiration for putting it all together and getting it to run its first training session in just over two weeks. It’s seriously impressive.
But to suggest that this has only happened because of the one and only Elon Musk seems… well, to paraphrase Huang himself, it seems unbelievable.
To be fair to Nvidia’s CEO, it’s possible he was referring to the fact that xAI is currently the largest buyer of Hopper-powered AI chips, and Musk is perhaps the loudest proponent of AI at the moment, along with OpenAI’s Sam Altman. But I think it’s unfair to place all the credit for the expansion work solely on Musk, without mentioning the full effort of the planners, designers, engineers and software developers involved.
And to be honest, it is borderline ridiculous to suggest that no one else in the world could achieve such a feat.
Not that I should be surprised, because if there’s one thing the tech world is particularly consistent about, it’s that the CEO is bon homme. Like Huang and Zuckerberg. Huang and Sutskever. Musk and Huang, again. And it has absolutely nothing to do with such companies spending an awful lot of money on Nvidia’s hardware. Determined, 100%, not certified.
Now I’m off to test several new chips from a well-known supplier. I wonder if its seller will call my efforts superhuman?