| ▲ | philistine 2 days ago |
| The US had put an export ban, and he clearly skirted it while at the same time banging a suspected Chinese spy. The company he ran like a fiefdom broke the rules set in place by the same country for which he's supposedly a loss. I don't see it. Nvidia has a lot to answer for, and the fact that Jensen was very successful as a CEO does not shy away from the cracks in the structure. |
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| ▲ | pj_mukh 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| Are we saying he was skirting the ban because he was having an affair with a Chinese spy? That seems like a stretch. Jensen was ideologically opposed to a ban, he didn't need any coaxing in that regard. It was illegal, and I'm sure if this comes to light there will be (major) repercussions, but I don't see it as an immoral move. Cheating on your wife of 40 years OTOH... |
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| ▲ | Ydarbleoj a day ago | parent | next [-] | | He was playing both sides and got caught. Nothing more. | |
| ▲ | jappgar a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "It's not immoral to violate trade sanctions if you don't think they should exist". | | |
| ▲ | kelnos a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Sure, why not? Morality and law are not always aligned. I'm not sure I would go so far to consider these sorts of trade sanctions "immoral", but I wouldn't fault someone for believing so. In this case, though, I think Huang just believed these sanctions were the wrong move, and would end up long-term helping China and hurting the US. Which is fair to believe, but believing a law is counterproductive doesn't give you immunity if you break it. | | |
| ▲ | adolph a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > Morality and law are not always aligned This is a significant philosophical point. The thing about that Lord Moulton said is that there are a bunch of things that are wrong that are not illegal, and we have to do that because people have to be capable of self-control. Patrick Deneen, in . . . The Failure of Liberalism said that he thinks liberalism is failing because it has come to the view that anything that is not illegal is moral.
https://www.econtalk.org/public-choice-and-politics-without-.... | |
| ▲ | jappgar a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Is it immoral for Jensen to cheat on his wife? What if he "believed fidelity was the wrong move" and that he'd end up divorced eventually anyways? When is disloyalty and dishonesty immoral? | | |
| ▲ | kergonath a day ago | parent [-] | | It’s something you are not equipped to judge. You don’t know much about his private life and the private life of the people around him. Having sex in itself is not the problem, and so far what was demonstrated was that he had sex, at least one with an alleged spy evading trade sanctions, and once with a subordinate. Either are improper and ground for firing; both together are untenable (plus the possibility that there are other skeletons; we don’t know for now). The relationship with his wife is neither here nor there, unless she wants to make it public. If she feels betrayed, wants a quick buck, or otherwise wants to for any reason, she will sue for divorce and, considering the publicity of the cases, she should get a favourable judgement. It’s easy to impose our morals on others. But more than half of republicans believe that gay sex is immoral just as strongly as you believe that adultery is. | | |
| ▲ | jappgar a day ago | parent [-] | | Sure, I don't disagree. I'm trying to point out the inconsistecy with the OP who implied sanctions evasion is not implicitly immoral but that "cheating" is. Huang may have had an agreement with his wife that this was fine. But he did not have an agreement with the justice department to flaunt the law and funnel GPUs to China. | | |
| ▲ | pj_mukh a day ago | parent [-] | | >>But he did not have an agreement with the justice department Neither did conscientious objectors? I don't think you mean to claim that the justice department is the final word on morality? Just that on this topic, you agree with the justice department (which is fine), but they will do things that you disagree with. They are no final arbiter and have helped enforce plenty of immoral laws in the past. There is even a case to be made that flooding the Chinese market with advanced GPU's will hamstring China's ability to build their own, just like they have done to our ability to manufacture. In fact that is exactly the case Jensen has made plenty of times. By holding back exports you are actually creating the market conditions in China for building advanced GPU's indigenously, CCP doesn't even have to do much, the market is responding. Who's immoral and unpatriotic then? | | |
| ▲ | jappgar 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | Comparing conscientious objectors, who refuse to participate in war, to someone who profits massively from supplying adversaries with advanced weaponry, is ridiculous. | | |
| ▲ | pj_mukh 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | You mostly ignored what I wrote so this is not really fruitful. But for more everyone else reading, not helping the enemy build better defenses is basically Sun Tzu 101. China keeps us addicted to their manufacturers, the least we could've done is kept them addicted to our GPU's (to be easily turned off during a time of war). But Mr.Moral Police can't look past one chess move, so we're screwed now. To be clear, I'm not saying mine is the only moral move (like others), I'm saying being confident about the morality here is senseless. |
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| ▲ | d1sxeyes a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Absolutely. Immoral and illegal/unlawful are separate things alogether. | |
| ▲ | ifyoubuildit a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Can you make the case for trade sanctions being a moral issue? | | |
| ▲ | SR2Z a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Isn't the specific trade law being broken related to arms control and dual-use technology? IMO it's not a terribly strong case to make while Boeing sells whole jetliners to China, but the law was put in place for both moral and practical reasons. | |
| ▲ | toast0 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | It would depend on the reason for the sanctions... If the sanctions are to prevent buying the products of slavery, that's a moral issue, and violating the sactions is also a moral issue. Same deal if the sanctions are to prevent selling things that will be used to carry out genocide/etc. That's a moral issue, so violating the sanctions is a moral issue. I don't think there's an alegation that the GPUs will be used for immoral purposes, just that the US government has national security concerns. Those concerns may or may not be valid, and may or may not be served by having trade sanctions applied effectively, but I don't think that's a question of morality. It's not de facto immoral to violate the law. It could be immoral to violate the law and conceal it. | | |
| ▲ | ifyoubuildit a day ago | parent [-] | | > It would depend on the reason for the sanctions... But then it would be the thing that is sanctioned that is the immoral activity, not the breaking of a sanction, right? It's like you said, unlawful != immoral. | | |
| ▲ | toast0 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I think you can make a case that breaking a rule intended to prevent immoral activity is in and of itself immoral, even if breaking the rule didn't result in the immoral activity. It's arguable either way, morality isn't a formal logic. There's no right answer, and it's mostly judged by popular consensus... If there is a final authority, they don't publish their notes. :p | |
| ▲ | jappgar a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | It would be immoral to sell weapons to your nation's enemies but not to your allies. Unless you're saying that disloyalty and betrayal are not issues of morality. It's very interesting to read here that Jensen is immoral for betraying his wife but not for betraying his country. |
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| ▲ | scott_w a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | However the fact he was having an affair muddies the waters on the two. At best, the optics look bad to someone outside. Yes, he could have been opposed for money reasons, and that’s a position that needs no more explanation. But how do we know he wasn’t being whispered to by the smoking baddie he was trying to impress? Maybe he’d not have taken the risk were he not having this affair but we know what men do when their ego is on the line. Case in point: Musk paying people to play PoE for him and losing his shit when he was caught. Do I think money is a good enough explanation? Yes. Could I believe that what’s in his pants also played a part? Also yes. | | |
| ▲ | SoftTalker a day ago | parent [-] | | People at this level get intoxicated with their power. They think they are invincible and can do whatever they want. Often they can. Sometimes it all comes crashing down, here for example, or the case of Eric Swalwell. But they never think it will happen to them. |
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| ▲ | consensus1 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | No, he probably wasn't doing it because of the Chinese spy. But when you are sleeping with a Chinese spy people are going to have questions. |
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| ▲ | jeanlou a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Sure but that's not the point here: he was getting frustrated in the interview because he was getting second guessed by someone who doesn't have as much insight has he does. Dude is the founder of Nvidia by the way. |
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| ▲ | outside1234 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The board should be fired next for allowing a CEO to have 60 direct reports and no succession plan. |
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| ▲ | UncleOxidant a day ago | parent | next [-] | | You're getting downvoted for this, but it has some merit. It could be argued that NVDA's flat structure is what led to the company's success - Jensen himself greenlit the development of CUDA from the anecdotes I've heard. However, in the last 2 or 3 years the board should have pushed for more redundancy and a succession plan. Since NVDA had such a flat corporate structure with Huang having ~60 direct reports, I expect that the company will be lost for a period of time as they try to get their bearings. This is an opportunity for AMD, INTC and others. | | |
| ▲ | outside1234 a day ago | parent [-] | | At the very least a succession plan. Just insane that there wasn't someone ready for this in case he keeled over one day (for some definition of keeled). This is a $5T (well, I guess $4T now) company we are talking about. What is the board being paid for? |
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| ▲ | riddlemethat a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | It turned them into one of the most valuable companies in history. The board can figure out succession now. | | |
| ▲ | buellerbueller a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Is that the reason? Or is it that they happened to make a product that became very in demand? | | |
| ▲ | krisoft a day ago | parent | next [-] | | You say that as if a lottery assigns companies what product they shall make. Or that they found their product designs in a kinder egg. They had an idea which they thought will be valuable. And they worked bery hard on making that idea a reality. People complain that companies don’t have leadership with long term vision. The leadership of NVIDIA heard the idea of GGPU computation and put the resources behind the idea to make it a practical reality. Here the gap between “nerdy idea” to “product sells like hot-cakes”, is measured in decades. That is not just luck. | | |
| ▲ | wnmurphy a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Finding yourself making matrix multiplication machines for computer graphics, then suddenly an unrelated technological revolution requires that exact hardware? They absolutely got incredibly lucky. | |
| ▲ | buellerbueller 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is survivorship bias. Show me a Jobs-like track record and then we can talk business genius. This guy had 1 at bat and (to mix sports metaphors) we don't know if he skated to where the puck was heading, or if the market happened to converge on this thing because it was available. Also, your comment has a hefty dose of survivorship bias. Lots of companies have long term visions they think will be valuable, and work very hard towards making them a reality. Few succeed. You're counting the survivors, not the attempts. Furthermore, you fail to demonstrate that a different CEO of NVIDIA would have done something different. |
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| ▲ | SR2Z a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This take is crazy; NVIDIA not only built the GPU, *they created the demand.* For a very long time there was nothing like CUDA. They're working on an open-source self-driving car. Back when they were a gaming company, they sponsored the gaming ecosystem. Jensen Huang cheated on his wife AND conspired to evade arms control regulations, but he's still a genius. | | |
| ▲ | buellerbueller 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | What are you're doing in your comment is a fallacy known in economics called survivorship bias. The NVIDIAs of the world are vastly outnumbered by corporations who made a long term bet that failed, but because you're counting the successes, not the attempts, you see vastly inflated outcomes. Count the attempts to make these long shots, and Huang appears very lucky indeed. Crystal ball? Hardly! He couldn't forsee the outcome of 3 (is it still 3, or has the body count grown) affairs. To prove Huang is a genius, you'd have to demonstrate that a different CEO of NVIDIA would have done something different. | | |
| ▲ | SR2Z 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | NVIDIA is 33 years old! How much more successful does the largest corporation in the world have to be for you to admit some skill was required? Another two decades? > Crystal ball? Hardly! He couldn't forsee the outcome of 3 (is it still 3, or has the body count grown) affairs. Fortunately, I'm not claiming that Huang is a genius at getting away with affairs. I'm claiming that if any CEO can be called a genius at running their business, Huang can. | | |
| ▲ | buellerbueller 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm not saying Huang is skill-less, and by making that claim in your comment, you are moving the goalposts. I am saying it is not obvious that he would have done genius-level better than a different CEO. Your best claim is that Nvidia is the biggest company in the world; therefore Huang is a genius. Maybe; some days Apple is also in the running for biggest company in the world. By your metric Tim Cook is therefore a genius. This makes me seriously doubt your metric. | | |
| ▲ | SR2Z 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Tim Cook did not build Apple from the ground up. Steve Jobs did, and if he were still in charge he would still unquestionably be a genius. You can doubt my metric, but it is quite difficult to grow a company to a trillion dollars while staying in charge the whole time. |
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| ▲ | drysine a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | "happened"? |
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| ▲ | outside1234 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Both of these things can be true. He can be the best founder in the world that we want to be there forever AND we need to have someone just in case that is 100% up to speed. This is a $4T company for Pete's sake! | |
| ▲ | a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | burnerthrow008 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Ok, but the goalposts are shifting. This started as "look how flustered he got when asked about China. That means he did it". |
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| ▲ | buttslut5099 a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Um it's absolutely possible to break the rules set in place by a country and help it in doing so. No clue whether that's the case here |
