Nathan Lambert: belief

Transcript context

…Since you mentioned Jensen, I’ve been reading a lot about history and about singular figures in history. What do you guys think about the great man view of history? How important are individuals for steering the direction of history in the tech sector? So, you know, what’s NVIDIA without Jensen? You mentioned Steve Jobs. What’s Apple without Steve Jobs? What’s xAI without Elon or DeepMind without Demis? People make things earlier and faster, whereas scientifically, many great scientists credit being in the right place at the right time. Eventually someone else will still have the idea. So I think that in that way, Jensen is helping manifest this GPU revolution much faster and much more focused than it would be without having a person like him there. This is making the whole AI build-out faster. But I do still think that eventually something like ChatGPT would have happened and a build-out like this would have happened, but it probably would not have been as fast. I think that’s the sort of flavor that is applied. These individual people are placing bets on something. Some get lucky, some don’t. But if you don’t have these people at the helm, it would be more diffused. It’s almost like investing in an ETF versus individual stocks. Individual stocks might go up or down more heavily than an ETF, which is more balanced. We’ll eventually get there, but I just think the focus is the thing. Passion and focus.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.