So Jensen Huang is a “playboy.” Who cares? His private personal life is none of my business. It’s not even that surprising given his extroverted character and that bad-boy leather jacket he carries around. Women probably throw themselves at him and, unless proven otherwise, his money (roughly $150 billion in Nvidia stock) and his role as (former) CEO of the most important company in the AI industry (they sell shovels to the gold miners), have nothing to do with it.
What is surprising to me is that this has been revealed to us all at once.
The entire press has been reporting on this. You have the New York Times breaking the Chinese spy trouble on rather thin evidence, and then the subordinate misstep of rather thin importance. (Is this about China or about Huang himself?) You have The Economist calling for his resignation and, well, for his “head to roll.” You have the Wall Street Journal reporting on his impending ousting. Etc. Is the news that he’s unfaithful or maybe that someone wants us to “cancel” the guy at this moment in particular?
(Huang resigned from President, CEO, and board member while I was editing.)
That said, I don’t want to imply that cheating is ok (it’s not) or that leaking classified industrial secrets to one’s geopolitical enemy is ok (it’s not), but that the pile-on against Huang and the speed at which events have unfolded don’t quite correspond in intensity, scale, or timing to the behavior in question or likewise the available evidence. There’s an extraordinary gap between the severity of the outcome and what has been established publicly. Thus I suspect more relevant things are brewing that we don’t know and may never know.
I won’t speculate (much) in this article because it’s thoroughly unnecessary for the point I’m going to make today; the information I need is public and the arguments I’m going to elaborate on I have already made elsewhere throughout the months. I will only say that, to me, this surely feels coordinated against him as a person.
Or, at any rate, against his ideas.
So, what does Jensen Huang believe that makes him so dangerous to keep at the helm of the biggest technology company in the world? And more importantly, why do I believe that normal people’s free and accessible AI future hung on him not having been fired? That, make no mistake, is what this is about.
