Why was the CEO of $1T Nvidia shopping at a night market in Taipei?

He flew there to give a commencement speech at NTU.

Here are the top 12 insights from Jensen’s speech:

1. We are at the beginning of a major technological era: “Like PC, internet, mobile and cloud, but AI is far more fundamental.”

2. AI will create new jobs that didn’t exist before: “Like prompt engineering, AI Factory ops, and AI safety engineers.”

3. AI will change every job: “Supercharging the performance of programmers, designers, artists, marketers, and manufacturing planners.”

4. You must learn to take advantage of AI: “While some worry AI may take their jobs, someone who is expert with AI will.”

5. Overall, AI software has opened multi-trillion dollar opportunities: “The world was simpler when I graduated college.”

6. Nvidia’s purpose: “To help the Einstein and DaVinci’s of our time do their life’s work.”

7. Nvidia almost died in its first years: Jensen had to call the CEO of Sega and say “that they had to find another partner but I needed Sega to pay us in whole or Nvidia would be out of business.”

8. Humility abut his weakness led to his success: Flying to Taiwan and working with Morris Chang on production (where Nvidia was weak) enabled their position today 25 years later.

9. Nvidia had to endure years of $1B market cap: Because they were investing in CUDA that created the base for the applications on top of GPUs like blockchain and AI.

10. Alexnet, trained on GPUs of Nvidia, in 2012 started the big bang of AI: Nvidia risked everything by doubling down on it and deep learning.

11. Sacrificing the profitable mobile market setup the AI opportunity: Nvidia had to leave a profitable business to focus on AI and robotics.

12. We are the starting line of AI: “Every industry will be revolutionized…Run after it.”

And why was he at the night market?

“Either you are running for food, or you are… food.”