An Alarming Spike.

Introductory Taylor Swift comes to Harvard.

---

1. Stephen Witt:

The revelation that ChatGPT, the astonishing artificial-intelligence chatbot, had been trained on an Nvidia supercomputer spurred one of the largest single-day gains in stock-market history. When the Nasdaq opened on May 25, 2023, Nvidia’s value increased by about two hundred billion dollars. A few months earlier, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s C.E.O., had informed investors that Nvidia had sold similar supercomputers to fifty of America’s hundred largest companies. By the close of trading, Nvidia was the sixth most valuable corporation on earth, worth more than Walmart and ExxonMobil combined. Huang’s business position can be compared to that of Samuel Brannan, the celebrated vender of prospecting supplies in San Francisco in the late eighteen-forties. “There’s a war going on out there in A.I., and Nvidia is the only arms dealer,” one Wall Street analyst said.

Huang is a patient monopolist. He drafted the paperwork for Nvidia with two other people at a Denny’s restaurant in San Jose, California, in 1993, and has run it ever since. At sixty, he is sarcastic and self-deprecating, with a Teddy-bear face and wispy gray hair. Nvidia’s main product is its graphics-processing unit, a circuit board with a powerful microchip at its core. In the beginning, Nvidia sold these G.P.U.s to video gamers, but in 2006 Huang began marketing them to the supercomputing community as well. Then, in 2013, on the basis of promising research from the academic computer-science community, Huang bet Nvidia’s future on artificial intelligence. A.I. had disappointed investors for decades, and Bryan Catanzaro, Nvidia’s lead deep-learning researcher at the time, had doubts. “I didn’t want him to fall into the same trap that the A.I. industry has had in the past,” Catanzaro told me. “But, ten years plus down the road, he was right.” Read the rest. (Source: newyorker.com)

---

2. Wolfgang Munchau on the West:

(W)e keep on underestimating our adversary's sophistication. China managed to respond to US sanctions on high-performance semiconductors by building its own. I well recall the shock expressed by US administration officials in late August when they found out that Huawei was able to use an advanced microchip in its latest smartphone. Chris Miller, the author of the book Chip Wars, poured ridicule on China over its failed attempt to build a semiconductor manufacturing facility. His narrative, too, underestimated China. When you take tens of thousands of dollars and pounds from Chinese students each year for their studies at prestigious universities in the UK and the US, do not be surprised that they learn something. There were 150,000 in the UK alone last year. (Source: eurointelligence.com)

---