NVIDIA is currently the most valuable company on the planet ahead of names like Apple and Microsoft, and its CEO Jensen Huang has a simple insight into how it got there.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has said that NVIDIA reduced the cost of computing by a million times, which is the company’s greatest contribution. “In the last 10 years, we increased (computing) performance by a million times. What have we really done? What Nvidia has contributed is that we’ve taken the marginal cost of computing and we reduced it by a million times,” he said at an event.
“Imagine if there’s something in the world that you rely on. It could be electricity, it could be an airline ticket. It could be anything you choose. (For computing), we reduced (the price) in the last 10 years by 1 million times. Well, when the cost of something reduces by a million times, your habits fundamentally change. (Thanks to NVIDIA), how you think about computing fundamentally changed. That is the single greatest contribute contribution NVIDIA ever made,” he said.
“We made it so that using a machine to go learn exhaustively enormous amount of data (became very cheap). It’s something that researchers wouldn’t even think twice to do. That’s why machine learning has taken off,” he added.
NVIDIA had popularized GPUs (Graphical Processing Units) many years ago, which operated differently from the more popular CPUs. Unlike CPUs, GPUs process data in parallel, which make processing and calculations much faster. In their early days, GPUs were used mainly for computer gaming, but around a decade ago, computer science researchers began discovering that GPUs were also very useful in the fields of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence — they made it possible to carry out large calculations much faster than traditional CPUs.
This in turn made it possible for researchers to input massive amounts of data into training AI models — had these researchers been using CPUs for their training, the same training processes would’ve taken exponentially more time and money, but because NVIDIA’s GPUs made it possible for researchers to train AI models cheaply and quickly, they helped the entire field get off the ground. To this day, NVIDIA’s GPUs are used in training AI models, and the demand from AI companies for its products has turned it into the most valuable company in the world. The missions of the world’s top companies can often be described very simply — Google organized the world’s information, and Apple produced the world’s best consumer products. NVIDIA’s, as it turns out, became extremely successful because it reduced the cost of computing by a million times.