Nvidia CEO ‘not easy’ to work with, say employees; Jensen Huang responds

Nvidia CEO

Though he is the longest-serving tech CEO currently — 31 years and counting — it is only in the last 18 months or so that Jensen Huang has been the talk of tech town. Riding the AI wave, Nvidia’s market value has zoomed past rivals and Huang is well-placed to lead the company's future innovations. In a recent interview with 60 Minutes, Huang was told that people who work with him use felt that he wasn’t easy to work with. “Demanding, perfectionist, not easy to work with,” were some of the words Nvidia employees used to describe their CEO.

Huang agreed with that assessment and said those traits describe him perfectly. “It should be like that," he said in the interview. "If you want to do extraordinary things, it shouldn't be easy,” Huang said.

The Nvidia CEO was also asked about AI being a threat to human jobs and said that humans will always be in the loop. “Because we have good judgment because there are circumstances the machine is just not going to understand,” Huang said in the interview.

Nvidia's recent success story under Huang is down to the rise of Artificial Intelligence. Their graphics processing units (GPUs), known for powering gaming PCs, turned out to be in big for training large language models. Huang had recognised the potential early on and Nvidia adapted its technology and software for AI applications. As AI boomed, so did the demand for Nvidia's chips, propelling its market value to staggering heights. Nvidia has become the go-to for AI GPUs -- from self-driving cars to generative AI. Nvidia’s market cap went past Amazon and it is now in the trillion dollar club.

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