Highlighting NVIDIA’s fast-growing impact, TIME magazine Wednesday named NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang to its list of most influential people of 2021.
NVIDIA has enabled a revolution that “allows phones to answer questions out loud, farms to spray weeds but not crops, doctors to predict the properties of new drugs — with more wonders to come,” Andrew Ng writes in a story featured on the cover of the iconic weekly magazine’s latest issue.
“Artificial intelligence is transforming our world,” writes Ng, who is founder of DeepLearning.AI, founder and CEO of Landing AI, and chairman and co-founder of Coursera. “The software that enables computers to do things that once required human perception and judgment depends largely on hardware made possible by Jensen Huang.”
Huang was one of seven honored on TIME’s cover for its annual issue on the world’s 100 most influential people. Others profiled include U.S. President Joe Biden, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady and singer Billie Eilish.
“In 2003, amid great skepticism, Huang directed his company Nvidia to adapt chips designed to paint graphics on computer screens, known as graphics processing units or GPUs, to perform other, more general-purpose computing tasks,” Ng explains.
“The resulting advancements — and powerful chips — laid a foundation that could accommodate much bigger neural networks, the programs behind much of today’s AI,” Ng writes.
Huang’s gambit worked, Ng explains, because he is among the world’s “most technically savvy CEOs.” He’s also “a compassionate steward of his employees and a generous supporter of education in science and technology.”
“With still emerging AI technologies creating an insatiable hunger for more computation, Huang’s team is well-positioned to keep driving technological advances for decades to come,” Ng concludes.
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