Chapter 1
The Denny's bet
Chapter 2
The accidental AI revolution
Chapter 3
The trillion-dollar engine
Chapter 4
The geopolitics of silicon
Ch 2 · The accidental AI revolution
nic The Hand-Delivered Supercomputer
Special delivery! Special delivery! A supercomputer right at your door!
nic Wall Street hated Nvidia's CUDA platform because allowing standard C programming on consumer chips raised manufacturing costs.
Quiz
In 2006, Nvidia launched which parallel computing platform, investing billions to add general computing power to gaming GPUs?
Quiz
Why did Wall Street initially penalize Nvidia's stock after the launch of the CUDA platform in 2006?
nic The CUDA software ecosystem binds global AI developers and financial networks to Nvidia.
Quiz
What is the main reason why Nvidia's CUDA has created a massive competitive moat against other chipmakers?
Quiz
What programming language was CUDA designed to support right from its launch, making it accessible to computer scientists?
Fun Fact
AlexNet's bedroom training: The neural network that sparked the modern AI revolution was trained on two consumer graphics cards costing just $500 each.
Quiz
In 2012, which groundbreaking neural network trained on two Nvidia consumer gaming GPUs won the ImageNet competition?
Quiz
Where was the historic AlexNet neural network physically trained by researcher Alex Krizhevsky in 2012?
Quiz
Who was the co-founder of OpenAI who accepted the hand-delivered DGX-1 supercomputer alongside Nvidia's CEO in 2016?