Jensen Huang: The Mindset That Built NVIDIA

NVIDIA started with the wrong technology, learned the right one from three textbooks bought at Fry’s, and went on to invent most of the major breakthroughs in modern computing. At Startup School 2026 at Chase Center, Garry Tan sits down with Founder and CEO Jensen Huang to talk about confronting reality, learning your way into new domains, and why resilience — getting through one day at a time — matters more than anything else.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  Welcome to Startup School 2026. Now let's get started. Please join me and welcome into the stage the founder and CEO of Nvidia Jensen Huang.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Hey Jerry.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Hey everybody.

• 0:41Speaker 00

  Oh my god.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  This is a surreal moment for me. Thank you. Thank you for being here Jensen.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  I'm delighted to do it. It's great to be here.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  Apparently, if you're here, you are gonna make it.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  So I'm happy I'm here.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  Ah Jensen.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  Well, for the students who only know Nvidia as a company at the center of AI, what part of the early Nvidia story do they most need to understand?

• 1:19Speaker 01

  The thing that most people don't believe is that the choice of our technology that we started the company with was absolutely wrong. And so we had started with the idea that we would reinvent 3D graphics. Well, the company's philosophy and perspective was that the general purpose computers, the CPUs, were really useful, but if we could augment it with accelerators, we could solve problems that otherwise too hard to solve. And one of the first problems we chose was 3D graphics. And during that time, 1993, the PC was just rumored to be coming.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  And our big idea was that we would turn every single personal computer into a game console, because we grew up in the era of game consoles. And so we thought, you know, what if we could design a system that would fit into the personal computer and it would turn it into a game console? And so we thought we would reinvent the algorithm that would require these large supercomputers and we would fit it into the PC. And we came up with some new algorithms. And we were excited about it. We believed in it. We reasoned about it in a thoughtful way. And we went to start the company to go build it. Well, it turns out the algorithm was exactly wrong.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  And the technology that founded the company turns out to be exactly wrong. And so in 1995, we realized that. And it was almost too late, because by then there were some 35, 40 other companies that were building 3D graphics for PCs. And so we realized that it didn't work. And I went back to the company. And we were at the company. I said, what are we gonna do? It doesn't work. And we were all talking about it. And I said, look, we won't have a company if we don't confront the fact that this doesn't work and start working towards the right algorithm. And then somebody told me, it turns out, none of us knew how to do it the right way.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  And not only did we choose the wrong technology, we didn't know how to do it the right way. And so that was a big day for me. I had a couple of $60, you know, a couple of hundred dollars in my pocket. And so I went down to Fry's and I bought three textbooks. And the textbooks was about OpenGL and how to design OpenGL pipelines. I brought it back to the company and gave it to the engineers. And here we are. We reinvented computer graphics. We're the world leader in modern computer graphics. We invented most of the major breakthroughs in the last 25 years.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Everybody would have thought that Nvidia started out as world leaders in 3D graphics. And we learned it from a textbook. And so we actually started the company, raised money, and bought textbooks. When you think about it. And so the big lesson is that, for me, is technology is changing all the time. And so long as you're able to confront the reality, so long as you are able to learn, the technology itself actually doesn't matter. And so since then, Nvidia has been, you know, inventing all kinds of technologies since. All kinds of technologies we've never really done before. And we approach everything with the same attitude.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  You know, if it's important to do, we're gonna go learn it. And how hard can it be? And it always turns out to be much, much harder than we expect. But you go into it with the attitude, how hard can it be?

• 5:06Speaker 00

  I mean backstage, we were talking about how, I mean, we were talking with some of the top YC companies. And you were saying that each one has an expertise in like a domain that you and Nvidia have an expertise in. And they're all just, I forget what you said. It was like an algorithmic domain of a sort. And so it sounds like 3D graphics was merely the first of an algorithmic domain.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 5:29Speaker 00

  And it came from a textbook. But then, you know, anyone could have read that textbook.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Particle physics, fluid dynamics. Yeah.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  But you created the thing that people want, like the end product that people want to pay a lot of money for.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  The big idea of the company that was spot on is that it is possible to augment the CPU to solve problems that otherwise are too difficult to solve. And molecular dynamics is one of them. Image processing is one of them. Inverse physics is another one. And so all kinds of different algorithms. Of course, deep learning is one of the major ones. And in order to create the company that we have today, we realized early on that it's not about building a great chip. It's about accelerating an algorithm domain. And so one of the things that I've always believed in is what makes great companies is a unique perspective about the world that you deeply believe in. It's not so much the technology. It's not so much the market even.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Those things all matter. And if you have the right technology for the right market at the right time, your life is gonna be a lot easier. A high-level vision about the future of some important thing, a perspective about it that's somehow unique, that you deeply believe in. And ideally, pursuing that vision is hard to do. Those are kind of good combinations. In our case, we realized that accelerated computing was gonna be important. And accelerated computing turns out to be very important. And our realization is everything to do with algorithm, not the chip, turns out to be exactly right.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  So you've said a lot about, I guess, the hardships of a founder. Are there a few stories that really jump out at you? I mean, the people in this room would love to start a company. But, you know, are they really prepared for eating glass? And, you know, possibly having to shut down the company, like things going wrong? Like, what are some of the pivotal moments that really jump out at you? I think you were just in Japan, right?

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  And you were sort of honoring Sega, was it? So I feel like that was a really powerful story.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  The project that led us to realize the algorithm we chose was wrong was a partnership with Sega. Sega had contracted us to build the game console after Saturn that turned out to have been Dreamcast. I don't know, does anybody know what Dreamcast is? Okay.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  So we did not build Dreamcast. We were originally supposed to build Dreamcast. But because our algorithm and our technology was fundamentally flawed, I went to Japan and I told Ira Manjri-san, the CEO at the time, that the contract that they gave us was a like $12 million contract, we will not be able to fulfill because the technology doesn't work. And I told him the reasons why. And then I advised that they choose somebody else to do it. But then I asked him, I told him that I unfortunately still need the money. And he asked me, you know, you could just imagine the conversation.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  So what you're telling me is, what I contracted you to do, you can't do, but you would like all the money on the contract. And I said, you got it. That's exactly right. But obviously, I was polite. I was humble. And he realized that I was honest and everything made sense.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  And if he didn't give us the money, we'd be out of business. And I think that this happens in this room. You don't invest in companies, you invest in people. And what Ira Manjri recognized was, here's, you know, somebody and a company that he trusted in the first place, the contract, and that he believed in, and that he would love to see, you know, make it to the next day. And so that $5 million kept us alive and, you know, gave me enough time to discover what to do.

• 9:37Speaker 00

  And then I guess if they held, they sold it for 15 million, I heard.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, they sold it the moment we went public. When Nvidia went public, our valuation was $300 million.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Three hundred million dollars in nineteen ninety-nine. That was real money.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  I think it's north of a trillion dollars now or so.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  It's more than true, yeah.

• 9:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's wild.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  So you're sort of the core, you know, I would like to say that you're the man who controls the spice.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  You know, before that, you know, I don't think anyone could have really predicted per se how important GPUs and, you know, the technology you built would be for this AI revolution.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  You know, what did you see to, I mean, was it the accelerator and being in the right place at the right time? Or surely there were a lot of things that led up to that, that allowed you to sort of capture this position?

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  I saw AlexNet just like everybody else saw AlexNet. And, and, but remember, our lens of the world, my view of the world, was always looking for algorithms. And that algorithm, the algorithm could be NAMD, the algorithm could be VASP, the algorithm could be OpenGL. You know, it could be SQL, some domain-specific language, some algorithm. And, and so my lens of the world was always looking for some problem that we might be able to help solve. When AlexNet came along, the algorithm was deep learning. And so the question is, what is this algorithm? And why does it matter? Why was it so effective? And what else can it do?

• 11:19Speaker 01

  And, and if you were to scale algorithms and scale it beyond that, what could it solve that otherwise you can't solve today? And the, the breakthrough for us was realizing that AlexNet was not AlexNet. That AlexNet was an approach with deep learning that allows you to learn any function. And so fifteen years ago, I was telling everybody that, hey, guess what? We just learned the universal function approximator. We just discovered the universal function approximator. We can give it, we could, you know, give it the, the answer for almost any function, and it could learn what the function is. And for a lot of functions, you don't have to be precise.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  And in fact, it's impossible to be precise. And so most of the interesting problems are imprecise in this way. And so the day that we realized we have a universal function approximator, the question then is, what does that, what does that, what does that do to the computing stack? What does that happen to software? What are the industries that this could impact? So on, so forth. Almost right away, we started working on computer vision. Almost right away, we started working on robotics, self-driving cars. Because that fundamental capability, you could imagine, solving some important problems in the area of computer vision and robotics. And so, so I think, I think the, the big breakthrough was simply

• 12:48Speaker 01

  that this is much more foundational than AlexNet. This is a way of doing software. And the implications to the processor, the middleware, the algorithms, the applications, you know, what I now describe as the fiber-layer cake. That entire industrial stack, I imagine, reinventing altogether about fifteen years ago. And this is simply about asking questions, reasoning about things to first principles, asking, you know, questions like, if this, then what? If, if this can get better, then so what? You know, asking all of the basic questions about, about something that you observe that's really impactful.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  I mean, one of the things that really jumps out at me is to what degree you go all the way into the weeds. You read papers, you, you know, talk directly to the principal scientists who are sort of coming up with these things. Do you have any advice for people in the audience? I mean, that's like true founder mode. And then, at the same time, you probably, you have an organization, and you have executives, and you have people who say like, here's the graph, we want to stay on this graph. You know, sometimes it ruffles feathers. Like, do you have any advice for people about an organization and how you navigate that, really? Like, how do you build an org that allows you to think in first principles? Because if the Fortune 500 did that, like, the Fortune 500 will probably look a lot more like Nvidia than not.

• 14:13Speaker 00

  And it doesn't. Like, you, you have built a very unique company.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  My state of mind when I'm, my state of mind is always, starts with curiosity. I have a whole bunch of questions myself. And, and of course, like anybody else, I'll seek the shortest path to the answer. But oftentimes, the, the answers from the people that are near me might not be satisfying. And, and I might have other questions. And maybe they're, they're busy doing something, and they're pursuing something. And so my first, my first inclination is to go discover the answers to my own curiosity. My second is, if I find that the information is, and that the domain of information or, you know, a particular field could be really important to somebody

• 15:02Speaker 01

  and could be important to our company, then my next inclination is, how can I learn as much as possible so that I could be of service to the company and share with everybody else? You know, this is no different than, than you, when you're, you're sharing knowledge. I mean, I watch your podcasts, and I watch your, your videos, and I really enjoy them. You're sharing ideas with everybody else. In a lot of ways, I think a, a CEO is in service of the company, in service of all the people that are working there. And you want to empower them with some insight.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  And so that's really where it's coming from. It's not so much a management technique, but a personality technique. You know, I, I want to empower you, and this is something really important that I just observed. Let me tell you why it's so important. Now, part of, part of having to be near the ground and be in the weeds, if you will, is because oftentimes the technology is complicated or it's changing really fast. And especially when it's changing fast, like, like our world. Unless you have a tactile sensation of what is actually happening, it could either, to you, feel like it's just moving way too fast to understand. But if you understand the first principles of it over time, then everything kind of makes sense.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  You know, it's kind of like surfing, I would imagine. I don't know how to surf, but I can imagine it's kind of like surfing. You get out on the wave. To me, it looks like chaos. But to a surfer, you know, somehow they get, right? They can read the waves and, and they know how to stay on top of it. And so I think being CEO is very similar to that. You know, you have to learn how to surf. In order to learn how to surf, you have to understand the waves. You have to be able to read the wind, and you have to have good timing. And you can't have any of that unless you try, unless you actually do it. And so, so partly is, is to inform myself. Partly is to try to figure out, you know, what is, try to break down the problem so that the company can learn it in a way that they can do something about. Part of it's about inspiring other people.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  And, you know, it's, it's all those basic traits of all the people in this room. You don't have to change your personality or your behavior when you become CEO. It is possible for you to continue to be yourself. And one of the things that I, that I, I learned a long time ago, and, and I, I have no idea where I saw this. But, but, you know, the CEO or the founders, you are the, you, you're building a car that you are going to race. You're going to build an F1 racer, but you're going to build it in a way that you can drive. You should adapt the car to you.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  You know, somebody, I think, asked me, you know, Jensen, if you, if you don't use conventional management techniques and organizational techniques, you know, what's going to happen when you leave the company? Well, you know, when I die on the job someday, you know, I told them, they'll just have to reshape the company for the next CEO. And the reason that's wisdom is because we're the F1 drivers. You know, we're the racers. And the world is really competitive, and we've got to stay, we've got to, you know, we've got to win. And we got to achieve our mission. And so whatever it takes to fit the car to you, whatever it takes to fit the organization to you, that's what you ought to do. And the next CEO, whatever the personality is, they can figure it out.

• 18:32Speaker 00

  Amazing. I mean, doesn't, it does seem like any change you make to the car will just slow you down and lose you races that, you know, isn't fit to you.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, or we're constantly tweaking the car to our needs. And that's really what I'm doing all the time. I'm constantly tweaking the company, constantly reshaping business processes and the way things work so that I can, you know, be more effective for the company.

• 18:57Speaker 00

  True founder mode.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, founder mode. Founder mode could scale for thirty-four years.

• 19:02Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  From zero to five trillion. No evidence, no.

• 19:12Speaker 00

  I'd love to switch gears to like what, you know, what are the frontier algorithms that you're most interested in now? I mean, I love that you're all the way down into the material science, all the way up into the app level. You know, you're the first to speak on stage about OpenClaw and now Hermes Agent. I wonder if you can sort of like walk us through a day in the life of like how you think about the different stages. I mean, going from materials to chips to data centers to even like the app level, like how people are going to work, like there's sort of this idea of a full stack AI factory.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Well, this is one of the things that is probably going to be the most useful skill in the future. And in fact, just in listening to you talk about about technology and your use of it, you know, one of the most important things is systems understanding, systems awareness, system design, system organization, but systems thinking. And the reason for that is because most of the low level things that has to be done are going to be done agentially anyways. They're going to be automated anyhow. And so whether it's, you know, in my generation, it's about compiling chips and synthesizing

• 20:29Speaker 01

  transistors and gates and functional blocks and all of that is now synthesized. And so most of our designers are systems designers. In the case of software, most software is going to be done agentially anyhow. So you have to be much more able to think abstractly about systems. What are the, what are the problems you're trying to solve? What are the constraints? Where, you know, where's the input? Where's the output? You know, where are information coming from? What is the rate of information flowing in and out of the system? What are the constraints? You know, and so is a processor, is a memory, is a networking, you know?

• 21:09Speaker 01

  And so understanding these systems problems at a sufficiently technical level is going to be very helpful to all of the people in this room. And I don't think that that way of that fundamental knowledge is ever going to be useless. I think it's going to be more and more useful. And so I try to understand systems the best I can. One of the things, one of the things, speaking of agents, the fact of the matter is we kind of have coarse level recursive self-improvement already. And the fact that every time you use it, it improves the markdown files. Every time you use it, it updates its long-term memory and the long-term memory is being

• 21:54Speaker 01

  processed, either compacted or turned into knowledge graphs or, you know, so on and so forth. It's been improved all the time, you know, asynchronously. And so the agent's getting smarter and smarter every time. Still, the problem is, and this is one of the, one of the problems that I think could be helpful for everybody to solve, is how can we have very, very specific, fine-grained control? You know, if not for rags, if not for conditional inputs, if not for all of our prompts directly into output was too coarse. And so the fact that we can condition, the fact that we can control the agents, all

• 22:34Speaker 01

  the way down to eventually, when it comes up with a plan, I change one word in a plan file, and that one word makes a delta difference. Not complete difference, but specific difference. Maybe it's one pixel, maybe it's one triangle, maybe it's one component in a CAD file, maybe one layer, one via, one connection, and then it regenerates everything else. I think that that level of control and that level of collaboration with agents will be game-changing. We don't need the agents to be 100% accurate, 100% high-quality in order for us to use it. It could, you know, literally be 80%, and then we help it the rest of the way, or it could be 99% we help it the rest of the way.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  And so I think controllability is probably the single biggest breakthrough that we need for agents at every single level.

• 23:26Speaker 00

  Do you think people will like, I mean, with Hermes or OpenClaw, it feels like that might actually be somewhat existential, like people should control their own personal AGI, like they shouldn't outsource that app and, you know, have it be just in the cloud and someone else's agent that like kind of tells you what to do. Like you kind of want it to be your own.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:48Speaker 00

  Is that part of the thrust behind Nvidia being so involved?

• 23:50Speaker 01

  I think, well, first of all, I need to understand agents because agents is the new software. And how is this new software processed matters a lot to computer architecture. And the more intimate we are about the nature of agents and how it's different than, than chatbots, which is how different than, than maybe inference in the very beginning, however we think about these processing layers, the more intimate we are about the nature of the processing, the better we could design systems. We, we kind of have to live in the future five to 10 years because it takes three or so years just to build a system, takes a couple of years to ramp it up, and you're

• 24:35Speaker 01

  dealing, and you would like them to be able to use the computer for 10 years after. So you kind of have to live in the future for a while. And so agentic systems for us, at the first principles is just what is the workload? What's the algorithm? How is it going to evolve? Where are the bottlenecks? You know, where are the AMDA's laws problems? And how does it scale? What happens to concurrency? How do you deal with sandboxes? How do you deal with MCP? How do you deal with, you know, working memory, long-term memory? How do you have all these autonomous systems, asynchronous systems, working all the time? And so what kind of design architecture makes perfect sense for that? And so we have to go and go discover that.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  And then, of course, the second thing is I want to use agents ourselves to make Nvidia go faster. And so we have Boris's in the back and we've got Claude Code autonomously running in sandboxes all over Nvidia, and that's really fantastic. And some people use Codex, some people use Claude Code, some people use Cursor, some people use Cognition. And we let kind of a thousand flowers bloom, let people select the tools they want to use, and then we learn from all of that. And so the second part is just helping the company move faster, use the tools, and the more they use it, the more we're going to learn about how to make it work better in the future.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  And the last part is discovering the future of solutions, technology for the future. And maybe, you know, when we, when we saw, when we saw the early versions of Chain of Thought come out of Stanford, this is probably a decade ago at this point, maybe eight years ago, you know, the question is, is how effective is that going to be in reasoning? And how scalable is it going to be? And what is the implication, for example, in computer vision if we can reason from prior knowledge? And, and then the big breakthrough, of course, just in thinking through that small little

• 26:37Speaker 01

  domain, you come to realize that maybe we don't need as much data for cars to train a self-driving car, which led us to creating AlphaMayo, which is the world's first thinking self-driving car. And with just a million miles or so, a couple million miles, it's an incredibly great self-driving car. And the reason for that is it's kind of like us, right? We don't need that many miles before we could drive fairly well most of our lives. And the reason for that is because we have prior knowledge from our language model, and we can decompose a situation we've never seen before and build it up out of things that we understood and know very well.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  And so, so that's an example of seeing something and then realizing the impact some, some time later. When the agentic systems came along, it's very, very clear that obviously a large language model needs memory, it needs prior knowledge, it needs tools, it needs ways to network with other agents. And so that kind of, you know, that, once you see some early indicators and you're able to reason about the future, helps you get a leap, you know, into, into the future.

• 27:53Speaker 00

  I feel like there's this pattern that I'm starting to see around Nvidia, where you see a problem, there's a new algorithm, there's some new thing happening, and then actually you're right there with open source. I mean, I remember when OpenClaw came out and people said it was unsafe, but you guys came out with a sandboxing sort of toolkit that like surrounds any harness and makes it safe.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  When I saw OpenClaw, my first thought was, well, first of all, I learned about it. And then, and then, you know, without, without much imagination, you just realized, we just designed a modern computer. This is the operating system that's going to hold a large language model. And, and in a lot of ways, OpenClaw to me was very Linux moment to me.

• 28:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  And now everybody can build their own AI. And I was so excited about that. And we contacted Peter and we said, hey, you know, all of Nvidia's engineers are your engineers. That's what I told Peter. You've got this battleship outside your house, you, you, you know, break down the problem as you desire, and we'll contribute as you wish. Same thing with the Hermes team, you know, and I'm so excited about the work that they're doing. I do think that the world needs the ability for everybody to build their own AI. And you could, you could, of course, and I encourage everybody to, to use cloud services as much as possible. Everybody should use ChatGPT and Claude and, right, everybody should use that.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  And, but if you, if you need to build your own AI because you're a company and, and you need to build your own domain-specific AIs, now you have Hermes and you have OpenClaw, you've got all kinds of, you've got LangChain, Deep Agent, you've got all these different ways, right, to build your own AI. And it's, it's quite frankly relatively easy because the software's smart.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  You know, and so AI's smart, and therefore AI must be so smart, you could adapt it easily. And so I, I think that, that we want, we want to encourage everybody and every company to build their own AIs. And, and who knows what innovation will come from the fact that it's open source.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  I feel like all the alpha is in building your own AI. I mean, if someone else is using whatever is off the shelf, but you're, you have a thing that can recursively self-improve, and it is, you know, I mean, the, people are very flippant about markdown files. They say like, oh, haha, it's just text, but like, text is intelligence. And we're in a different.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Words are thoughts.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, words are thoughts.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it turns out you can.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Try to, try to think without words.

• 30:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's true. So switching gears again, I mean, a lot of people are, anytime you move the cheese, people get a little worried. Intelligence is going to be on tap, which is really awesome. I think it bodes well for everyone in this room. What do you think changes about the economy? What do you think, you know, happens in sort of a broader sense?

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Obviously, what I'm going to say is uneven. There are some, you know, we're going to automate tasks. We're going to automate cognitive tasks. If that task is, somebody makes a phone call and, and sends a bunch of words, you know, across the phone to you, and your job is to provide a response. And, and if all the information is at your fingertips, because you, you have all the database here, and you should be able to, to answer that question completely. In that case, that task will be automated away. Okay? Ignoring that for a second, not that, not that you, not that we, we ignored this, but

• 31:30Speaker 01

  my, my point is, I'm going to answer the question about, about really the great opportunity. And so, many tasks will be automated away, many jobs, every single job will be, will change, and there'll be a whole bunch of new jobs, and that, that I think we know. The bottom line is this, the evidence would show that, and it makes perfect sense, that AI and automation is creating jobs everywhere. The narrative about AI destroying jobs is exactly backwards. AI eliminate tasks. AI automates tasks away, but it doesn't necessarily, doesn't necessarily eliminate jobs.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  And the reason for that is because the, the job of a person has a purpose, and that purpose has many tasks. Some of those tasks could be automated away, many of those tasks cannot be. And so, the evidence suggests that here we are, we've automated coding, which is a task, but the job of a software engineer appears to be growing, right? The number of software engineer jobs, year over year, has increased 10%. The task of reading radiology scans has been automated, but the number of radiology jobs has increased some 20% in the last several years, even though AI has taken over the whole field. And the reason for that is because the backlog of patients is incredibly high.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Now doctors and hospitals could admit a lot more patients. In order to admit a lot more patients, you need more nurses, more radiologists. And so, the same thing with software, we, the backlog of ideas, the backlog of ambition and aspiration is so high, that if we can automate away ta, the task of programming, we could hire more software engineers to do more things. We could be more ambitious. Same thing, you know, just across the board. They said Harvey is going to eliminate all of the paralegal jobs, and the number of lawyers will be reduced. Turns out, paralegals are growing like crazy. And the reason for that is because the backlog of lawsuits is really high, and now these

• 33:41Speaker 01

  law firms could get a lot more cases through. In order to do so, you got to hire more people. And so, this is a classic, classic example of productivity increasing growth, increasing growth drives more employment. This is the reason why there's more employment today than there was when I first came out of school.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  So, we've been talking a lot about software and agents. Another really exciting thing that Nvidia is all the way out on the edge on is actually physical robots. You know, how far out? I think in the past, you might have even said, this, as soon as this year. What's the latest thinking on, you know, when can we expect practical robotics?

• 34:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, the moment that I saw us generating video, that was, that was a great moment for me. The moment that, and I start, I saw us generating video, I mean, we did the original work on auto progressive GANs, okay? And we did the original work on conditional GANs. Long before the first videos were generated outside that people saw, a couple of years earlier, inside our labs, we were driving a simulator completely generated by video, and computer, completely generated by neural networks. And so, the moment I saw us generating articulation, if I can generate video of a finger moving,

• 35:06Speaker 01

  if I could generate video of a hand picking up a glass, why can't I cause a robot to do the same? And so, the moment I saw that generative AI happening, I realized that robotics articulation was around the corner. And so now the question is, you know, how is the robot going to understand, to generate motions that obey the laws of physics? How's that, how does it understand causality? How does it understand, you know, friction, tension? How does it understand the laws of physics? And so, it started us down the journey of creating what we call physical AI now, and everybody calls it physical AI. And physical AI, we started working on world foundation model, an AI that understands the laws of physics and how the world works.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  And we started down the, the journey of, of working on robotics. I would say, the chat GPT moment of robots happened a couple of years ago already.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  And, and the reason for that is, remember when chat GPT first came out? It didn't do anything productive. It didn't do anything useful, but it opened our imagination about what's possible. And I would say, a couple of years ago, you know, robots walking around, that we could do reinforcement learning, fine tune it for, and grounded in physics, really happened a couple of years ago. So now, what, what do we need to do? We need to do all the same things that we're doing now for agentic systems. We have to create environments for them to learn in, to eval in, eval against, and so we have to do real to sim to create environments. We have to do, we have to generate simulators that are based on simulation, grounded physics

• 36:46Speaker 01

  simulation, as well as generative physics simulations. And so, Isaac Sim, Cosmos, and all the work that we do in that area is related to simulation. And then the last part is sim to real. And so, that part is, has something to do with reinforcement learning, grounding it on physics, grounding, grounding on all the electromechanical systems that, that robots require. And so, but these three basic system, I think, builds up the eval, if you will, the, the, the post-training of, of robotics, and I, I think we're, we're going to see it right around the corner.

• 37:24Speaker 00

  Amazing. Where does physical AI show up first in a way that's really economically real? Are you seeing that already?

• 37:30Speaker 01

  We conjectured that, that robotics was going to come along, and decided that the first application of robotics that has both a large enough market, relatively standardized technology so that we could scale, and get the flywheel going, and has real economic value, was self-driving cars. And so, inside Waymo, our chips from Nvidia, at, at Tesla, we were in the car, now we're in the data center. Mercedes, we're in the data center, we're in the car, with a software stack. We worked on Alpemayo, and we open sourced it. And the reason why we open sourced the self-driving car stack is because you need it for agriculture,

• 38:15Speaker 01

  you need it for mail delivery, you need it for warehouse AMRs. There's so many different ways that you could apply autonomous navigation, and none of those markets are big enough to be a self-driving car market, and we thought it was sufficiently diverse, that we would create the whole stack for it. And so, we're working with autonomous vehicles in all kinds of different places. Our robotics business, autonomous vehicle business, basically physical AI business, is probably almost, it's like $10 billion, so it's really, really big already. Likely, this will be one of the largest industries in the world, and it'll take longer than a couple, two, three years, it'll take less than 10, and so, this'll, this'll be our next $100 billion business.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  Amazing. I want to take a moment, I think this is the exact right crowd to, you know, maybe as an arena, we can welcome Jensen to X. Welcome to X, I think you made your first post, and thank you for your leadership.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  You know, that's, that just, that shows you how introverted I am. It took me until 2026 to have the first post on X. You know, it's, I'm probably the last human on earth that, that did it. But, but what I posted was too important to me, and too important to the, to the industry, and too important to the world. And so, so I, I over, overcame my, my shyness and, and put my first thing out on X.

• 39:47Speaker 00

  No, thank you for your leadership. I mean, open source, open weights, open source models are incredibly important for, I mean, what all of us in this room want to do, we want to create startups.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, if not for open source, the mobile cloud industry would have never happened. If not for open, if not for Linux, if not for Kubernetes, if not for all of these, you know, platform, if not for TensorFlow, or more important, PyTorch, right? The, and the early versions of a CAFE, right? Torch, I mean, all of the, Theano, remember the early versions of all? Those were all open source. If not for all of that, how would we have modern AI?

• 40:26Speaker 00

  Well, thank you for your leadership, and your voice is incredibly important here. Thank you.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

• 40:37Speaker 00

  Before we go, I feel like we, I just really resonate with your story. I think that everyone here, I mean, would love the wisdom of, you know, your journey coming here. I mean, what should a young person learn now, given all the things that you're seeing, all the algorithms that are going to take hold in society? What should a young person learn now that will still matter, based on what you're seeing?

• 41:01Speaker 01

  Well, some of the things that I saw today, and some of the starters I met today, was really, really quite encouraging. And, and the thing that, that the big takeaway is, of course, the simple stuff is going to get automated away. And when I say "simple stuff," I mean software, you know, coding. The idea that you would, you would do a, you would solve a problem by sitting in front of a computer and you're, you're, you're actually writing, you know, writing code, that concept is obviously going to get automated away. You know, in my generation, when I was, when I was growing up, we had to do long division. I mean, for God's sakes, who has to learn long division, you know?

• 41:45Speaker 01

  And so that got coded away, that got automated away. And so I think the simple stuff is going to get automated away. But the hard problems, the hard sciences, physics, chemistry, biology, you know, computer science, computer engineering, systems thinking, you know, all, and particularly the domains that are intersecting, those hard problems will never go away. And so AI is just an incredible tool that helps us become even more ambitious, even more impatient about solving these extraordinarily large and incredibly hard problems than before. And so, you know, if you, if you look at my generation, when I first graduated,

• 42:29Speaker 01

  a chip designer would design a chip with maybe a thousand transistors, and that would be a very large chip. You know, now, designing a trillion transistor chips is not even, you know, if somebody would have told me, Jensen, our next chip is a trillion transistor, I said, "Okay," you know? It's not a thing. And the reason for that is because we are so ambitious now, the, the, the scale of the problem, the scale of the task is no longer a matter. And so you don't have to worry about, about, you know, how much coding, how many engineers. You don't have to, you don't have to think about those things anymore. You just have to think about what is the, what is the problem you have to solve. And so I think that the deep, deep tech stuff, the deep science stuff,

• 43:11Speaker 01

  understanding, understanding the intersection between technology and social issues, understanding market, market gaps and, and holes, opportunities. I think all of that still exists. And, and the better you are at systems thinking, so that you could orchestrate millions of agents solving problems autonomously, the better off you are. And so that's why system thinking is going to be so important. But otherwise, I think the world's going to continue to have a lot of great challenges for us to solve. Go to school the same old way. You know, stay in school.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  Stay in school.

• 43:51Speaker 00

  I guess, I usually like to end with, you're looking out on the crowd. There are a lot of people who, I mean, I started this, the opener with, like, I honestly look in the crowd and I see people who are not different than us per se. You know, we actually just are technical and like love systems.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Thank you, thank you.

• 44:15Speaker 00

  What advice would you give to this room of, you know? And you, you see yourself in this, in this room, and like, I'm curious what you would say. If you could send a telegram, a message to the 18 to 22-year-old version of yourself, what would that be?

• 44:32Speaker 01

  I could tell you exactly how I felt when I first, when Nvidia first founded and, and the three of us started. The, the thing I felt at the time is there was so much for me to know and so much for me to learn, and I didn't know it. And I was telling you earlier, there, at the time, there was, there were no YouTube, there's, you know, no YC, nobody's teaching you how to start a company. And so I went to the bookstore and I bought a book, and the book said, "How to Start a Company." Unfortunately, the book was like 500 pages long. And, and so, you know, I figured by the time I read it, you know, I'd be out of business, and Lori and I'd be out of money, and so there's no sense reading it.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  But the thing that, the thing I remember very, very vividly is that, how scared I was to go raise money, because I felt that I was about to talk to a bunch of people, and I didn't know how to answer their questions. And, and it's true, and I barely know how to answer their questions even today. But the thing that I learned is, none of that stuff matters, as it turns out. And, and you're always going to have things that you don't know. And every single day, the world's changing, technology's changing. Obviously, this is the greatest time in the last 60 years to start a company. The whole industry has changed.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  It's a complete reset from a technology perspective. The single most important technology in human history, the computer, has been completely reset. And so this is absolutely the single greatest time to start a company. And I'm, I'm jealous of all of you and, and the opportunities you have ahead. I mean, it's going to be incredible. So it's the perfect time, on the one hand. On the other hand, the technology's changing so fast. And so the question is, what's the right feeling for you? And eventually, and I told you the story of us, of me buying the other book, the textbook. I think the, the psychology and the feeling that I have today on all of the new experiences and the new technology and new markets and new dynamics,

• 46:43Speaker 01

  I look at it and I say, "This is important, I've got to go learn it, and I've got to go do something about it, and I better get to it as fast as I can, and how hard can it be?" I always have this feeling, "How hard can it be?" And, truth be told, it is way harder than you think. And, but you, you don't want your mind to be, to be there. You want your mind to be, "How hard can it be?" And let the suffering come to you a little bit at a time. You know, don't, don't imagine how hard it's going to be, and let all of that turn into anxiety and not doing something about it.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  You want to imagine in your head, "How hard can it be?" You know, I've got a whole bunch of, I've got a bunch of AI agents helping me anyways. And so, "How hard can it be?" And then you get going on working on it. And so that's probably the, the attitude of an entrepreneur. You know you have to learn a bunch of stuff along the way. You believe in your ability to learn, which is, you know, learning is the single greatest superpower. And if you go into it with the attitude, "How hard can it be? If anybody can do it, I can do it," and just realize that it will be hard, and you just have to have the resilience to overcome it every single day. You don't have to overcome life in one day. You just have to overcome that morning, that morning. You know, you have to overcome today, today.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  And so it's not a big deal, just get through today, wait till, right? Work towards tomorrow, keep following your dreams. And the rest of everything, if you stick, if you stick with it long enough, you know, Nvidia happens. And so, you know, I think that the wisdom that I can, if there's anything, is resilience is probably the single most important thing. And if you believe in something, just get going on it, and get your mind, you know, out of, out of keeping yourself from pursuing it, because of, you know, fear or anxiety or lack of confidence or whatever it is. And that you're just going to tell yourself, "I'm going to learn my way there."

• 48:50Speaker 00

  Jensen Huang, everybody.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  All right, guys, thank you.

• 48:56Speaker 00

  Thank you so much.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  Yes, thank you. Thank you, guys.