Jensen Huang believes questions of whether artificial intelligence could destroy humanity are fear-mongering – and get in the way of progress. The founder of Nvidia, which makes the computer chips enabling AI such as ChatGPT, he was rankled when a journalist wondered if he is “an AI Robert Oppenheimer”. He’s not building bombs, he responded.

But for journalist Stephen Witt, what he terms “The Fear” (shared by arguably “the three most cited computer scientists alive”) was a motive for writing The Thinking Machine, his history of Nvidia. His book, which doubles as a biography of its founder, asks: what does the artificial intelligence Nvidia facilitates mean for the future of humanity?

Review: The Thinking Machine – Stephen Witt (Penguin)

Nvidia is currently one of the world’s most highly valued companies. At over A$5 trillion, its valuation is close to that of one of its largest customers – Microsoft.

Founded to produce video game graphics, Nvidia pioneered “parallel processing”: doing more than one thing at a time. It developed an electronic circuit board that can quickly perform many mathematical calculations, called a “graphics processing unit” (GPU). Then, Nvidia looked for other users who needed a lot of computing power.

When its equipment was applied to “neural networks”, or computer systems which mimic brains – a key technology in AI – it struck the goldmine.

Huang believes AI is a force for progress, spurring a new industrial revolution, writes Witt. Huang enthused “the marginal cost of calculation has gone to zero, and this has opened up incredible possibilities”. He dismisses concerns, saying of AI: “all it is doing is processing data”.

Jensen (originally Jen-Hsun) Huang was born in Taiwan. His family’s story is........

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