Jensen holds court
Notes from being on the ground at Nvidia GTC. Also: OpenAI's "distraction" warning, Meta gets its own OpenClaw, and more.
I’m sending this super late due to spotty plane WiFi on my flight back from San Jose, where I spent the day at Nvidia’s GTC conference. I interviewed Modular CEO Chris Lattner and Decart CEO Dean Leitersdorf at the Nebius booth in the afternoon. More to share from those convos in the coming days. But first…
Token king
In an industry shaped by eccentric billionaire founders, Jensen Huang operates in a league of his own.
Ahead of attending my first-ever Nvidia GTC conference today, I’d heard the stories: Huang pays obsessive attention to even the smallest details, his keynotes are unusually long, and he doesn’t use a script. All of it turned out to be true, of course.
When I first showed up in the parking lot at the SAP Center in San Jose, home of the Sharks, a guy was talking about the Cinderella Effect and open source models on a Jumbotron. Inside the arena, about 30,000 people were packed in to hear AI’s de facto leader give his state of the union.
The keynote itself consisted of Huang freewheeling for over two hours. There were no words on his teleprompter, only his next slides. He’s funny in a Jobsian way that you don’t really see anymore, and way more technical than any other tech CEO I’ve seen, rattling off acronyms at a pace that would lose most audiences. The sheer mastery he has of the details is remarkable. At times, he’s like watching a professor giving a lecture. Other times, he’s the ultimate AI hypeman.
The keynote started 15 minutes late and had moments where transitions took longer than expected. But it felt real. In an age where Apple gathers media to watch a pre-recorded video, it was refreshing to be in the audience for something happening in the moment with the imperfections that dynamic brings. At one point, during a small fumble, Huang quipped: “This is what happens when you don’t practice.” The whole thing was so long that it needed a recap at the end: a musical number with an animated Huang sitting around a campfire with humanoid robots singing and playing music.
What came through most clearly was how Huang sees his source of power: as kingmaker.
