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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2599 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 8, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Jensen Huang just got busted having an affair with what's probably a Chinese spy.

Jensen is a wifeguy of 41 years. In some sense he probably never stood a chance.

Blow-ups like this reinforce my bias that while poly/open relationships exist, you can't get away with them if you're a high status man. Sure, if you're a billionaire CEO, your wife may say she's okay with a discreet affair but she'll deny it and throw you to the wolves (and take you to the cleaners) if it ends up on the front page of the NYT. Similarly, women having affairs with married billionaire CEOs may be driven crazy by being #2 bitch in a way that they wouldn't really mind if the man had normal status. And if they are okay with it, it's probably because they're spies.

Now Jensen's wife hasn't said anything about divorcing him, but he's publicly apologizing to her and his family for this, so I presume they at least need to keep up the appearance that they're not poly. Since poly is low status.

Am I wrong?

The custom that a fortunate man cannot part with his fortune is unreasonable. Consider:

Historically, Huang and Nvidia were well-known only among the gamers and computer graphics experts who were the original intended markets for Nvidia's graphics processing unit (GPU) products. In 2017, a Fortune profile article acknowledged: "If you haven't heard of Nvidia, you can be forgiven."[52] During the AI boom, Huang's net worth rose rapidly along with the value of Nvidia's stock, from US$3 billion in 2019 to US$90 billion in May 2024.[55] During the same timeframe, Huang became more widely known. In March 2024, Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Instagram with a picture of himself and Huang wearing each other's signature jacket: "He's like Taylor Swift, but for tech".[56]

Clearly, it would be better for someone more brilliant and more capable of loving his wife to take over one of the largest AI hardware companies. Huang is a leftover from when it was a gaming company, but it is taboo to take a fortune from a man and give it to someone better able to make good use of it.

Yeah, that's what I keep coming back to. Bro got into this to make 3d games go fast. Being one of the most important people in the AI revolution is way out of his depth.

Its not like it happened by accident. Nvidia foresaw the use of their cards for scientific computing when none of their competitors did. Like all siccess stories, Huang was lucky that the future came in a particular shape, but he also made very savvy moves.

This is not true. Both AMD and Intel saw this coming at roughly the same time (eg, see the Xeon Phi line), but were too focused on CPUs to really capitalize on it. Nvidia's success is less in the foresight and more in the lack of distraction at the time.

See my reply to @dailydogma. Other companies may have dropped the ball, but NVIDIA definitely picked it up early.

I agree with you that Nvidia made some very savvy moves, but "foresaw the use of their cards for scientific computing when none of their competitors did" is not among them. Everyone saw this coming. What crowned Nvidia was the accessible software ecosystem they built around the cards. AMD has always been really weak on the software side, which caused them to fall far behind. Intel was too focused on their CPU market and the Phi line was a product of that--it tried to be a GPU you could program like a CPU. IBM had similar problems as AMD, though less due to being weak on the software side and more due to being run by lawyers that want to make sure nobody can ever actually use it.

Okay, that's fair. They executed well, though, and my point is more that NVIDIA (and Huang) weren't just silly gamers who got the AI revolution magically dumped into their laps.

No but it did happen by accident. He started a gaming hardware company, didn't design the hardware himself, then he got fortunate that AI ended up being based on linear algebra.

I think a lot of people think the world is a lot more ordered than it is. Fortune means luck. A lot of successful people are lucky.

NVIDIA began working on high-performance parallel computation 2003-2007. They created and released CUDA in 2007, long before AlexNet, so that scientists could do high-performance calculations in a dedicated computing language instead of formatting their work as gimped shaders. In 2007 NVIDIA had already released a separate GPU for scientific research: the Tesla.

Between 2009 and 2011 NVIDIA's annual reports repeatedly made it clear that they considered scientific computing to be one of their three top priorities, on par with gaming. They saw this as investing in financial modelling, pharmaceutical modelling and others potentially large markets.

AlexNet didn't come out until 2012.

Yes, Huang was fortunate that AI ended up being based on linear algebra, but business development is about going hunting for Lady Luck and being ready to welcome Her when she arrives. NVIDIA definitely did that.

TLDR: The reason that NVIDIA is a giant and AMD is barely an afterthought (in GPUs) is because NVIDIA made a lot of expensive and tactically insightful investments in the 2000s, long before deep learning came along.

Yes, Huang was fortunate that AI ended up being based on linear algebra, but business development is about going hunting for Lady Luck and being ready to welcome Her when she arrives.

I don't disagree with you at all. The question is, given the exact same behavior from Huang, what's the spread of his final net worth over different worlds? I believe he rolled top 1% on that and his median outcome was being worth maybe $2 million right now. What do you think?

I've no idea? I don't really believe that you can model the world like that - Rawlsian 'but what if you were somebody else' philosophy has never really held much interest for me.

Certainly every very rich man had a lucky break. More so now, when the world is more global and competition is fiercer. So hypothetically Musk / Huang / whoever would have some lower median net work spread over all the infinite worlds that don't exist. Unless they are actually genuinely special: I haven't met any of them. I've met someone comparable and he was definitely a cut above most people in risk-management/politics/drive/intelligence but how far is hard to tell.

In general though I'm more interested in analysing how people make good decisions to maximise their potential for lucky breaks than to what extent people do get lucky breaks.

I've no idea? I don't really believe that you can model the world like that - Rawlsian 'but what if you were somebody else' philosophy has never really held much interest for me.

It's basic probability. What is the distribution w(*|Jensen)?

Maybe they are actually genuinely special: I haven't met any of them. I've met someone comparable and he was definitely a cut above most people in risk-management/politics/drive/intelligence but how far is hard to tell.

They could be 99%ile latently but that still means the median of w(*|Jensen) might be $2 million. So they are special, but not more special than many people on this forum.

In general though I'm more interested in analysing how people make good decisions to maximise their potential for lucky breaks than to what extent people do get lucky breaks.

Your analysis will be confounded if you can't separate the luck from the decision. A lot of people have this issue actually and it leads to cargo culting. Common with Musk fans imo.

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