NVIDIA – The Health Care Blog

Watching Where and How You’re Walking

Jul 18, 2025

By MIKE MAGEE

In a speech to the American Philosophical Society in January, 1946, J. Robert Oppenheimer said, “We have made a thing …that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world…We have raised again the question of whether science is good for man, of whether it is good to learn about the world, to try to understand it, to try to control it, to help give to the world of men increased insight, increased power.”

Eight decades later, those words reverberate, and we once again are at a seminal crossroads. This past week, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, was everywhere, a remarkably skilled communicator celebrating the fact that his company was now the first publicly traded company to exceed a $4 trillion valuation.

As he explained, “We’ve essentially created a new industry for the first time in three hundred years. the last time there was an industry like this, it was a power generation industry…Now we have a new industry that generates intelligence…you can use it to discover new drugs, to accelerate diagnosis of disease…everybody’s jobs will be different going forward.”

Jensen, as I observed him perform on that morning show, seemed just a bit overwhelmed, awed, and perhaps even slightly frightened by the pace of recent change. “We reinvented computing for the first time since the 60’s, since IBM introduced the modern computer architecture… its able to accelerate applications from computer graphics to physics simulations for science to digital biology to artificial intelligence. . . . in the last year, the technology has advanced incredibly fast. . . AI is now able to reason, it’s able to think… Before it was able to understand, it was able to generate content, but now it can reason, it can do research, it can learn about the latest information before it answers a question.”

Of course, this is hardly the first time technology has triggered flashing ethical warning lights. I recently summarized the case of Facial Recognition Technology (FRT). The US has the largest number of closed circuit cameras at 15.28 per capita, in the world. On average, every American is caught on a closed circuit camera 238 times a week, but experts say that’s nothing compared to where our “surveillance” society will be in a few years.

The field of FRT is on fire.

Innovators: Avoid Health Care

Jun 18, 2024

By KIM BELLARD

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang has become quite the media darling lately, due to NVIDIA’s skyrocketing market value the past two years ($3.3 trillion now, thank you very much. A year ago it first hit $1 trillion). His company is now the world’s third largest company by market capitalization. Last week he gave the commencement speech at Caltech, and offered those graduates some interesting insights.

Which, of course, I’ll try to apply to healthcare.

Mr. Jensen founded NVIDIA in 1993, and took the company public in 1999, but for much of its existence it struggled to find its niche. Mr. Huang figured NVIDIA needed to go to a market where there were no customers yet – “because where there are no customers, there are no competitors.” He likes to call this “zero billion dollar markets” (a phrase I gather he did not invent).

About a decade ago the company bet on deep learning and A.I. “No one knew how far deep learning could scale, and if we didn’t build it, we’d never know,” Mr. Huang told the graduates. “Our logic is: If we don’t build it, they can’t come.”

NVIDIA did build it, and, boy, they did come.

He believes we all should try to do things that haven’t been done before, things that “are insanely hard to do,” because if you succeed you can make a real contribution to the world. Going into zero billion dollar markets allows a company to be a “market maker, not a market-taker.” He’s not interested in market share; he’s interested in developing new markets.

Accordingly, he told the Caltech graduates:

I hope you believe in something. Something unconventional, something unexplored. But let it be informed, and let it be reasoned, and dedicate yourself to making that happen. You may find your GPU. You may find your CUDA. You may find your generative AI. You may find your NVIDIA.

And in that group, some may very well.

He didn’t promise it would be easy, citing his company’s own experience, and stressing the need for resilience. “One setback after another, we shook it off and skated to the next opportunity. Each time, we gain skills and strengthen our character,” Mr. Huang said. “No setback that comes our way doesn’t look like an opportunity these days… The world can be unfair and deal you with tough cards. Swiftly shake it off. There’s another opportunity out there — or create one.”

He was quite pleased with the Taylor Swift reference; the crowd seemed somewhat less impressed.