“I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering.”
— Jensen Huang
Friday charts: The Wrath of Huang
Jensen Huang, famous for his maniacal dedication to work, once tried to strike a work-life balance by taking up cooking. He was good at it. But it didn’t make him any more balanced.
In “Thinking Machines”, Stephen Witt relates a story of Huang inviting a longtime work friend to the house for lunch with his family. When a complicated dish Huang was preparing didn’t go as planned, he exploded in anger, screaming at his top-of-the-line appliances.
“I think we all understood we had to get out of the kitchen,” the friend said. “It was just time for Jensen to yell at his stove.”
They understood because Huang did a lot of yelling at work, too.
Most of the time, Huang is said to be very pleasant — entertaining even. “He keeps up a semicomic deadpan patter at all times,” according to Witt.
But he has a quick-trigger temper, too. “Jensen was always so charming and self-deprecating,” an employee explained. “Suddenly he’s screaming at the top of his voice in front of a hundred people.”
They called it the Wrath of Huang. “Those who contradicted him were often shocked when he exploded in fury,” Witt says, “berating them cruelly in front of an audience of colleagues.”
Huang was unapologetic. “Failure must be shared,” he said.
I do it right there. I give you feedback in front of everybody. Feedback is learning. For what reason are you the only person who should learn from this? You created the conditions because of some mistake you made or silliness that you brought upon yourself. We should all learn from that opportunity.
Huang reasoned that this was better than the alternative. “I don’t like giving up on people. I’d rather torture them into greatness.”
His competitors felt tortured, too, as Witt writes: “He poached employees; he lifted ideas; he spun the reviewers; he kicked his fallen competitors in the teeth.”
This did not make Jensen popular with the competition — or his allies, even. “Nvidia made enemies all along the way as they rose to power, including with partners and suppliers,” a longtime observer said. “Jensen, you could say he’s a personal friend of mine. But he was ruthless.”
He may have been most ruthless with himself. After one especially good quarter, when Nvidia was near the height of its success, Huang opened a meeting reviewing the company’s performance by making a confession to the assembled executives: "I look in the mirror every morning and say ‘you suck.’”
He thought all this was normal. Beneficial even. He thought that pain and suffering is what builds resilience.
But he really did not want to be asked about his personal pain and suffering. As freely available as he made himself to the press, he only wanted to talk about business and technology. When Witt, his biographer, strayed into personal territory in their last interview together, it triggered the Wrath of Huang.
He accused me of trying to psychoanalyze him; he told me how much he disliked answering my biographical questions, especially those that attempted to illuminate his mental state. “I don’t like these probing questions,” he said. “I don’t like talking about myself, OK?! I’m not into therapy.” He suggested that my questions were stupid; he called them “pedestrian.” He denied there was anything exceptional about himself, against all accumulated evidence. “Look, I’m — I am super normal,” he said.
He’s not normal, of course, as anyone who dealt with him extensively would confirm. “Interacting with Jensen is like sticking your finger in the electrical socket,” one of his executives said.
And he probably could have used some therapy.
If, at the height of his incredible success, he still thought that he “sucked,” you can imagine how he must feel about himself now.
As he confronted his fate this week, he seems to have turned the Wrath of Huang onto himself. “According to people who’ve spoken with him in recent days,” Bloomberg reports, “Huang has already taken a penitent turn, castigating himself as a ‘piece of shit.’”
That is a level of pain and suffering I would not wish upon anyone.
Let’s check the charts.
Huang appreciation post:
The GPUs that Huang invented were expected to depreciate quickly, but they seem to be appreciating instead. The cost of renting a two-year-old B200 is higher than ever.
Tokens up, spending flat:
Ramp data shows that token usage continues to grow rapidly, but falling token prices means that spending on tokens has flatlined.
Huang’s undoing?
A lot of Nvidia chips found their way to China via intermediaries in Asia, almost certainly with Huang’s tacit approval. This likely made him a target for US authorities who wanted to enforce the official export ban more strictly.
The Huang effect:
Open-weight models account for 70% of the tokens served by the model-router Vercel. Huang was the biggest champion of open-weight models because they democratized access to AI and accelerated innovation.
The big two:
Open-weight models have forced OpenAI and Anthropic to compete on price. As a result, their revenue growth has flattened out, despite serving more tokens.
AI use cases:
Ramp data shows that coding remains by far the largest use case for LLMs, although “customer support” has recently become relevant.
Market signal:
Investors have been signaling that they want the spending on infrastructure to slow. Huang’s resignation probably means that it will.
Conspicuously absent:
An all-time ranking of business tycoons published by The Economist somehow leaves Huang outside of the top 50.
He’d probably agree, based on how he’s feeling this week. But I don’t.
However things work out, I think he belongs in the top 10.
Have a great weekend, unwrathful readers.
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