Jensen Huang’s DGX-1 story gets new context
© Elon Musk A 2016 email between Elon Musk and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang was released in late April as part of the Musk v. Altman court exhibits. The emails were compared the email with Huang’s recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, where he told a different version of the DGX-1 launch story.
First DGX
DGX-1 was NVIDIA’s first dedicated deep learning system, a complete AI training machine built around Tesla P100 GPUs, NVLink, HBM2 memory and NVIDIA’s software stack. NVIDIA marketed it as a turnkey system for researchers and data scientists who needed GPU compute for neural network training. NVIDIA announced the system on April 5th.
New (old) emails emerge
The email exists because Musk was involved with OpenAI during its early non-profit period. In April 2016, he asked Huang if OpenAI could buy one of the early DGX-1 units, adding that OpenAI was unaffiliated with Tesla and funded by him and a few others. Huang replied: “This is the first supercomputer that’s selling itself off the web! Demand coming from all over.” He also said NVIDIA would make sure OpenAI received one of the first systems.
Jensen Huang faked to Elon Musk that the DGX-1 is "selling itself off the web"
by u/No_Palpitation7740 in LocalLLaMA
Nearly ten years later, Huang recalled the launch differently on Joe Rogan’s podcast. He said: “nobody in the world wanted it. I had no purchase orders, not one.” He then added that nobody wanted to buy it “except for Elon,” calling Musk his first customer.
And when I announced this thing, nobody in the world wanted it. I had no purchase orders, not one. Nobody wanted to buy it, nobody wanted to be part of it, except for Elon. He was at the event and we were doing a fireside chat about the future of self-driving cars. I think it was like 2016 at that time, it was 2015. And he goes, you know what, I have a company that could really use this. I said, wow, my first customer. And so I was pretty excited about it.
— Jensen Huang in Joe Rogan Podcast
One thing I wanted to note is the timing. NVIDIA announced DGX-1 at GTC on April 5, 2016, while the email exchange took place about a week later. It is possible that NVIDIA received orders or strong interest in the days after the announcement, which would make both statements technically true. Still, Huang later recalled that there was no demand before Musk became the first customer, so I guess that’s how it really was.
Source: Reddit , Joe Rogan Podcast
