Chapter Twenty-Eight · Part VI, The Thinking Machine

The GPU Accident

Forthcoming

A nine-year-old from Taiwan is sent by mistake to a Kentucky reform school and given the toilets to clean. Thirty years later Jensen Huang is spending a billion dollars his investors want back on a feature for customers he admits do not exist. The feature was built by Ian Buck, a graduate student who had wired thirty-two games cards together to play Quake on a wall. Why a chip made for shading monsters turned out to be the right machine for Hinton's networks: a master chef, and a thousand line cooks.

This chapter has not been serialised yet. It will appear on Substack first, and this page will carry its opening when it does.

In this chapter
Jensen Huang, Shoichiro Irimajiri, Ian Buck, Patrice Simard, Dan Ciresan, Andrew Ng, Bryan Catanzaro
The idea it builds
A screen of dots and a layer of neurons are the same problem: thousands of small multiply-and-add sums, none of which waits for another.