The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip

This insightful biography from journalist Witt (How Music Got Free) recaps how Taiwanese American electrical engineer Jensen Huang built Nvidia, the microchip company he cofounded, into the central supplier for the AI revolution. Witt’s colorful portrait paints Huang as a no-nonsense striver who built his company with smarts, a maniacal work ethic, and his signature management technique of screaming at underlings. (Witt reports that employees revere Huang anyway, viewing such incidents as “terrifying but cathartic.”) Equally crucial was Huang’s willingness to bet the company on dicey technologies, first on “parallel computing” architecture that had failed in previous applications but ended up considerably increasing the processing speed of Nvidia’s chips, and then on neural networks, which were regarded as unworkable until the enhanced capacity of the company’s chips enabled breakthroughs in machine learning in the late 2010s. Witt offers a perceptive account of how Huang thrived amid the cutthroat competition of Silicon Valley by pursuing offbeat products and niche markets, and his unrivaled access leads to some revealing moments, as when Huang explodes at Witt for suggesting that AI might harm humanity. The result is an entertaining account of a brave new world at its dawning. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, Gernert Co. (Apr.)