'As far as I know, there's only one person in the world who could do that.' Nvidia's CEO praises Elon Musk for a 'superhuman' feat

UNITED STATES - SEPTEMBER 13: Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, arrives for the Inaugural AI Insight Forum in Russell Building on Capitol Hill, on Wednesday, September 13, 2023. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images) — (Image credit: Tom Williams via Getty Images)

I'm not a cynical person by nature. I fully understand how the trillion-dollar tech industry operates. I know that it never pays to say anything negative about a customer who is looking to spend countless dollars more. But sometimes, just sometimes, a CEO will decide to say something that just makes me go "Oh, come on! Really?" and in an interview with a technology investment firm, Nvidia's boss did just that.

The statement in question can be heard in a snippet of the interview posted by X channel StockMKTNewz (via Wccftech) when Jen-Hsun Huang was asked for his thoughts on xAI's recent expansion of its Colossus supercomputer build that took just 17 days to complete.

"Just building a massive factory, liquid-cooled, energized, permitted in the short time that was done...I mean that is, like, superhuman. And, as far as I know, there's only one person in the world who could do that. You know, I mean, Elon is singular in this understanding of engineering and construction and large systems, and marshalling resources. It's unbelievable," Huang said.

Really? Only one person in the world? Just one? Sure, the teams involved do deserve a huge amount of admiration for putting the whole thing together and having it run its first training session in just over two weeks. That's seriously impressive.

But to suggest that this only came about because of the one and only Elon Musk seems… well, to paraphrase Huang himself, it seems unbelievable.

To be fair to Nvidia's CEO, it's possible that he was referring to the fact that xAI is currently the biggest purchaser of Hopper-powered AI chips and Musk is perhaps the most vocal proponent of AI at the moment, alongside OpenAI's Sam Altman. But I do think it's unfair to place all the credit for the expansion work solely on Musk, without mentioning all of the effort by the planners, designers, engineers, and software developers involved.

And to be frank, it's borderline ridiculous to suggest that nobody else in the world could achieve such a feat.

Not that I should be surprised because if there's one thing that the tech world is especially consistent at, it's CEO's being all bon homme. Like Huang and Zuckerberg. Huang and Sutskever. Musk and Huang, again. And it's absolutely got nothing to do with the fact that an awful lot of money is being spent by such companies on Nvidia's hardware. Definitely, 100%, certifiably not.

Now, I'm off to test more new chips from a well-known vendor. Wonder if its vendor will call my efforts superhuman?

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Nick, gaming, and computers all first met in the early 1980s. After leaving university, he became a physics and IT teacher and started writing about tech in the late 1990s. That resulted in him working with MadOnion to write the help files for 3DMark and PCMark. After a short stint working at Beyond3D.com, Nick joined Futuremark (MadOnion rebranded) full-time, as editor-in-chief for its PC gaming section, YouGamers. After the site shutdown, he became an engineering and computing lecturer for many years, but missed the writing bug. Cue four years at TechSpot.com covering everything and anything to do with tech and PCs. He freely admits to being far too obsessed with GPUs and open-world grindy RPGs, but who isn't these days?