YouSaid · the spoken record
Jensen Huang
We hold 77 passages that may be Jensen Huang’s. We do not publish them until we can confirm who spoke. See the correction.
On the record 2026
podcast
This is everything the corpus holds for Jensen Huang. It is not everything they have said on the record.
Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections
“How can you not be romantic about that? The fact that it's a reasonable thing to expect the end of disease. It's a reasonable thing to expect. It's a reasonable thing to expect that pollution will be drastically reduced. It's a reasonable thing to expect that traveling at the speed of light. Actually, in our future. And then not for a long distances, but short distances. People ask me how, well, first of all, very soon I'm going to put a humanoid on a spaceship. And it's going to be my humanoid. And we're going to send it out as soon as possible. And it's going to keep improving and enhancing along the flight. And then when it's time,”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“I've always had great confidence in the In the kindness, the generosity. The compassion, the human capacity. I've always been extremely confident of that. Sometimes More so than I should. And I get taken advantage of, but it doesn't ever cause me not to. I start with always that people want to do good. People want to help others. And vastly, I am proven right. Constantly proven right And often exceeds my expectations. And so I have complete confidence in the human capacity. I think the thing that give me incredible hope is what I see as I extrapolate, as what I see now is possible, and as I extrapolate based on the things that we're doing, what will very likely happen. And that there's so many things that we want to solve. There's so many problems we want to solve. There's so many.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“Succession planning. If you worry all that anxiety of succession planning, then what should you do about it? Then you break it all the way back down. The most important thing you should do today, if you care about the future of your company post you, is to pass on knowledge, information, insight, skills, experience as often and continuously as you can, which is the reason why continuously reason about everything in front of my team Every single meeting is about a reasoning meeting.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“Character, humanity, all of those things Compassion, generosity, all of the things that you say just now I believe those are superhuman powers, and that now intelligence is going to be commoditized because we've spoken about it the most important thing is your education. Now, even when they said the most important things your education, when you went to school, there's more than just knowledge that you gained. And so, but unfortunately, our society had put everything into one single word. And life is more than one word, and I'm just telling you my life would suggest that being lower is”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“And yet, I have a role in that circle. It's actually kind of interesting. They're more educated than I am. They went to better schools than I did. They're deeper than the fields at their end, all of'em. I have sixty of'em. They're all superhuman to me. And somehow I'm sitting in the middle, orchestrating all sixty of them. And so you got to ask yourself, What is it about a dishwasher that allows that dishwasher to sit in the middle of superhumans? Does that make sense? And so But that's my point. My point is intelligence is a functional thing. Humanity is not specified functionally.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“And just really important to break down what is intelligence. The word we use all the time, it's not a mysterious word. Intelligence has a meaning. And it's a system that it's something that we do that includes perception and understanding and reasoning and the ability to do plan. And that loop is fundamentally what intelligence is. Intelligence is not one word that is exactly equal to humanity. And that's, I think, really important to separate the two. We have two words for that. I'm not, I don't over fantasize about, and I don't over-romanticize about intelligence. Intelligence, and people I've heard me say it before, I actually think intelligence is a commodity. I'm surrounded by intelligent people I'm surrounded by intelligent people more intelligent than I am in each one of the spaces that they're in.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“I don't know if the chip will ever get nervous. And that's the, you know, of course, the conditions by which that causes anxiety or nervousness or whatever emotion I believe that AI will be able to recognize those and understand those. I don't think my chips will field those. And therefore, how that anxiety, how that feeling, how that excitement, how that, you know,”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“I would hire the one who is expert in using AI. And so I would advise that every college student, every teacher should encourage their student to go use AI, every college student should graduate and be an expert in AI. And everybody, if you're a carpenter, if you're an electrician, go use AI. Go see what it can do to transform your current job, elevate yourself. If I were a farmer, I would absolutely use AI. If I were a pharmacist, pharmacist, I would use AI. I want to see what it could do to elevate my job so that I could be the innovator to revolutionize this industry myself. And so that would be the first thing that I would do. And then I would also Also, help them. It is the case that the technology will dislocate and will eliminate many tasks.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“So, my first recommendation before, and this is now how I deal with anxiety. In fact, we just talked about it earlier. Enormous anxiety about the future, enormous anxiety about the pressure, enormous anxiety about uncertainty. First, break it down And then I'm going to tell myself. Okay, there are some things you can do something about. There are some things you can't do anything about. But for the stuff that you can do something about, let's reason about it. And let's go do it. If we were to hire a new college graduate today, I have a choice between two one that has no clue what AI is and one that is expert in using AI. I would hire the one who's expert in using AI. If I had an accountant, a marketing person. One that is expert in using AI supply chain, customer service, a salesperson, business development, a lawyer.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“And the reason for that, Alex, you know, as I'll say, for the audience, I think The goal of specification, the artistry of specification, the goal and the artistry of it, is going to depend on what problem you're trying to solve. When I'm thinking about giving the company strategies and formulating corporate directions and things that we should do, I describe it at a level that is sufficiently specific that people generally understand the direction and it's actionable. It's so specific enough that they can take action on it. But I underspecify it on purpose so that enable 43,000 amazing people to make it even better than I imagined. And so when I'm working with engineers, when I'm working with people, I think about what problem am I trying to solve? Who am I working with?”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“Reason for that is this What is the definition of coding? I believe the definition coding as of today is simply specifying specification and maybe if you want to be rather directive, you could even give it an architecture of the software the year you wanted to write. So the question is how many people could do that? Describe a specification for a computer to go telling the computer what to go build, how many people I think we just went from 30 million to probably 1 billion. And so every carpenter in the future will be a coder, except a carpenter with AI is also an architect. They just increase the value that they could deliver to the customer. Their”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“And because we're able to study scans so much faster now, you could study more scans, you could diagnose better, you could Could impatient faster. We can see people more. The hospitals are making more money. You have more patients in the hospital. You need more radiologists. I mean, the amazing thing is... It's so obvious this was going to happen. The number of software engineers at NVIDIA is going to grow, not decline. And the reason for that is because the purpose of a software engineer and the task of a software engineer coding are related not the same. I wanted my software engineers to solve problems. I didn't care how many lines of code they wrote.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“Computer vision was superhuman in 2019, maybe a little bit later 2020. Okay. And so it's been a long time since computer vision has been superhuman. And so the prediction was radiologists would go away because studying radiology scans was a thing of the past. AI will do that. Well, they were absolutely right. Computer vision is completely superhuman. Every radiology platform and package today is driven by AI. And yet, the number of radiologists grew. And so the question is why, and we now have a shortage of radiologists in the world. And so one the alarmist warning went too far and scared people from Doing this profession that is so important to society, and so it did harm. Now why was it wrong? The reason why is because The purpose of a radiologist, the purpose is to diagnose disease and help patients and doctors. Diagnosed dis”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“And I just want to remind them that the purpose of your job and the tasks and tools that you use to do your job are related not the same. I've been doing my job for 33 years. I'm the longest running Tech CU in the world, 34 years. And the tools that I've used to do my job has changed. Continuously in the last 34 years and sometimes quite dramatically over the course of couple to three years. And the one story that I really want to make sure that everybody hears is the story, the first job that computer scientists said AI researcher said was going to go away was radiology because computer vision was going to achieve superhuman levels. And it did.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“It's like, what do you mean? I could just Well, by the way, it's happening right now, right? You know that when you go to China, you're going to see a whole bunch of people teaching their claws to try to go out and look for jobs and do work, make money. And I'm not actually, I wouldn't be surprised if some social thing happened or somebody created a digital influencer super, super cute, or some social application that feeds your little tomagoti or something like that. And it becomes out of the blue, an instant success. A lot of people use it for a couple of months and it kind of dies away. Now, the odds of... A hundred thousand of those agents building NVIDIA 0%. And then the one part that I won't do, and I want to make sure we all do, is to recognize that people are really worried about their jobs.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“DLSS 5 also lets because the system is open you could train your own models to determine and you could even in the future prompt it you know I want it to be a tune shader I wanted to look like this kind of you know so you can give it even an example and it would generate in the style of that all consistent with the artistry you know the style the intent of the artist and so all of that is done Forty artists so that they can create something that is more beautiful, but still in the style that they want.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“Yeah, I think their perspective makes sense, and I could see where they're coming from because I don't love AI slot myself. All of the AI generated content increasingly looks similar and they're all beautiful. And I can't, I'm empathetic towards what they're thinking. That's just not what DLSS 5 is trying to do. I showed several examples of it. But DLSS-5 is 3D conditioned, 3D guided. Its ground truth, structure data guided. And so the artist determined the geometry. We are completely truthful. To the geometry maintained so in every single frame. It's conditioned by the textures, the artistry of the artist. And so every single frame, it enhances, but it doesn't change anything. Now, the question is, the question about enhancing.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“Most of the things that I say outside, I'm fairly certain about. And the reason for that is because it's going to impact somebody else. And I want to be quite concerned about that, quite circumspect about that. For stuff that I'm reasoning about inside a meeting, a lot of things could turn out differently. And so, but it doesn't ever stop me from reasoning. The way that I manage and lead, I'm constantly reasoning in front of people. And even when I'm talking to you, you can kind of see me kind of reasoning through things.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“My assumptions about the future and why the future is going to manifest. So long as those assumptions and that input. Doesn't change or didn't change materially, then I should expect that the output won't change. And so my simulated output of the future is still going to happen. And if it's still going to happen Still going to go after it. I believe it's going to, you know, and so there's a combination of two or three human characteristics. Ability to go into an experienced fresh minded, the ability to forget the setbacks? The ability to believe in yourself To believe what you believe and stay true to that belief. But you're constantly reevaluating. This combination of three, four, five things, I think is really important for resilience.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“Oversimulate everything and all the setbacks and all the trials and tribulations and all the disappointments. You don't want to simulate all that in advance. You don't want to know that. You want to go into a new experience thinking it's going to be perfect. It's going to be great. It's going to be incredibly fun. And then while you're there, you know, you need to have endurance. You need to have grit so that when the setbacks actually happened and those setbacks are going to surprise you, the disappointments aren't going to surprise you. You know, the embarrassments are going to surprise you. The humiliations are going to surprise you. You just can't, now you just got to turn on the other bit, which is just forget about it. Move on. Keep moving. And to the extent that... To the extent that”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“Exactly. That is, by the way, what I was trying to explain is that there's a incredible superpower of being have the mind of a child. And I say to myself oftentimes when I look at something and almost almost everything. My first thought is how hard can it be? And so you get yourself into that mode. How hard could it be? And nobody's ever done it. It looks gigantic. It's going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars. It's going to take, you know, all this. And you just go, yeah, but how hard could it be? How far And so you got to get yourself into that state of mind. You don't want to actually.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“Whatever worries me, tell somebody else, don't just keep it. Don't freak them out. Decompose the problem into smaller parts and get people to and inspire them to be able to go do something about it. But part of it is just forgetting. A lot of it is you got to be tough on yourself. Come on, stop crying about it. Let's get going. And then you get out of bed. And then the other part is you're attracted to the next shiny light, the next future. The next opportunity, the next, okay, that's behind us. What's next? It's a lot. I think, you know, you watch this with great athletes. They just worry about the next point. The last point is behind them. The embarrassment. You know, a setback. And because I do so much my job publicly.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“And part of, you know, likes part of it, part of it is forgetting. One of the most important attributes of AI learning, as you know, is systematic forgetting. You need to know when to forget some things. You can't memorize everything. You can't keep everything. You don't want to carry everything. One of the things that I do very quickly is I decompose the problem, I reason about the problem, and I shared a load with it. When I say I tell everybody, I'm essentially sharing that burden. As quickly as possible”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“Therefore, what are you going to do about it? In almost everything that I feel, I break it down, I reason about, okay, what's the circumstance? What has changed? What's hard? And what am I going to do about it? And I break it down, decompose the problem And the decomposition of these. Circumstances Turns it into manageable things that I can do. And the only thing that after that I could do is, did you do it? Did you either do it or did you get somebody else to do it? And if you didn't do it, you reasoned that you need to do it and you didn't do it and you didn't get anybody else to do it, then stop crying about it. And so I'm fairly.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“How we build things back to the United States in so many different plants, chips, computers, and of course these AI factories, I'm completely aware that, and I have the benefit, and this is a real, real gift with mainstream investors, teachers, policemen who have somehow, for whatever reason, invested in NVIDIA or because they watch Jim Kramer bought some stock and now are millionaires. And I am completely aware of that circumstance. I'm aware of the circumstance that NVIDIA Is central to a very large network of ecosystem partners behind us and downstream from us. And so the way I deal with that is exactly what I just did. I reason about what is it that we're doing. What is the impact that has on other people benefit positively or even Even through great burden, for example, to supply chain And the question is”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“Conscious about the fact that NVIDIA's success is very important to the United States. We generate enormous amounts of tax revenues. We establish technology leadership for our nation, technology leadership is important for national security. National security not just in one aspect of national security, all aspects of national security. When our country is more prosperous and Could do a better job with domestic policies and helping social benefits because we're generating so much reindustrialization in the United States. We're creating mountains of jobs. We're helping shift the”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“I was reminded of a CEO who told me, you know, Jensen, it's theoretically impossible for a fabulous semiconductor company to exceed a billion dollars. And I won't bore you with why, but of course it's illogical and there's a lot of evidence we're not. And then somebody told me, you know, Jensen, you'll never be more than $25 billion because of some other company. Somebody told me that you'll never because, and then so that'sn't principal first principle reason thinking. And the simple way to think about that is, what is it that we make and how large is the opportunity that we can create? Now, NVIDIA is not in the market share business. Almost everything that I just talked about don't exist. That's the part that's hard.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“And then the rest of it to me is it possible for NVIDIA to be a, you know, three trillion dollar revenues company in the near future? The answer is of course yes, and the reason for that Because it's not limited by any physical limits. There's nothing that I see that says, you know, gosh, three trillion dollars is not possible. And It turns out NVIDIA supply chain is the burden is shared by two hundred companies. And the fact that we scale out on the backs of with the partnership of this ecosystem. Question is do we have the energy to do so? And surely we will have the energy to do so. And so all of these things combined. That number is just a number, you know, and I still remember Nvidia was the first time we crossed a billion dollars.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“What would happen to the world's economy if the productivity were to improve so substantially, what would happen are we going to discover new drugs, new products, new services? And so when you take these things in combination, I am absolutely certain that That the world's GDP is going to accelerate in growth. I'm absolutely certain the percentage of that GDP that will be used for computation will be a hundred times more than the past because it's no longer a storage unit, it's a product generation unit. And so when you look at it in that context and then you back into what is NVIDIA's do and how much of that New economics, new industry would we have to benefit to address, I think we're going to be a lot, lot bigger.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“Computers, because it was a storage system, it was largely a warehouse. Now building factories. Warehouses don't make much money. Factories directly correlate with a company's revenues. And so The computer did two things. Not only did it change the way it did it, its purpose in the world changed. It's no longer computer, it's a factory. A factory is used for generation of revenues. We now seen not only is this factory generating products, commodities that people want to consume, Seeing that the commodities are so interesting, so valuable, so to so many different audiences, that the tokens are starting to segment like iPhones.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“The only thing that would cause it to go back is if this way of computation, this way of computing, generating information that's contextually relevant, situationally aware, that is grounded on new insight before it generates information, this computation intensive way of doing computing would only go back if it's not effective. So if for the last ten, fifteen years while working on deep learning, if at any single moment I would have come to the conclusion that, you know what, this is not going to work out. I think this is a dead end, or it's not going to scale. It's not going to solve this modality. It's not going to be used in this application. Then, of course, I would feel very differently about it. But I think the last five years has given me more confidence than the last 10 years, the previous 10 years. The second idea”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“To now, AI computers are contextually aware, which means that it has to process and generate tokens in real time. So we went from a retrieval-based computing system to a generative-based computing system. Going to need a lot more processing in this new world than in the old world. We need a lot of storage in the old world. We need a lot of computation in this new world. And so So that's the first part of it. We fundamentally changed computing in the way how computing is done.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“We're already there. NVIDIA GPUs are the first GPUs in space. And I didn't realize it was so interesting to it. I would have declared it maybe we're in space. Little astronaut suit on one of our GPUs. But we've been in space. It's the right place to do a lot of imaging.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“The unit of computing used to be GPU to us. Then it became a computer. Then it became a cluster. Now it's an entire AI factory. When I see a computer, when I see what NVIDIA builds in the old days, I visualize the chip. And then when I announced a new product, new generation, like ladies and gentlemen, we're announcing Ampere today. I pick up the chip.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“You put all that stuff together. If I were a developer today, I would target CUDA first. I would target CUDA most. And that's the reason that I think in the final analysis is our first that's even our first. Advantage. Our second one is our ecosystem. The fact that we vertically integrated this incredibly complex system, but we integrated horizontally into every single company's computers. We're into Google Cloud, we're in Amazon, we're in Azure.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“That velocity combined with the installed base in the developer's mind is just going to now take the developer's mind from the developer's perspective. If I support CUDA, Tomorrow it will be 10 times better. I just have to wait six months on average. Not only that, if I develop it on CUDA, I reach a few hundred million people, computers. I'm in every cloud, I'm in every computer company, I'm in every single industry, I'm in every single country. So, if I had to create an open source package and I put it on CUDA first I get these built attributes simultaneously. And not only that I trust 100% that NVIDIA is going to keep Kuda around and maintain it and improve it and keep optimizing the libraries for as long as they shall live. You could take that to the bank, and that last part, trust.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“And the reason for that is because it's never been just about the technology, the technology, of course, was incredible visionary. But it's the fact that the company was dedicated to it, stuck with it, expanded its reach. It wasn't three people that made coup successful. It was $43,000 that made CUDA successful. And the several million developers that believed in us that trusted that we were going to continue to make CUDA 1, 2, 3, 13, that they decided to port and dedicate their software on top of it, their mountain of software on top of it. And so the install base is the number one most important advantage. That install base, when you amplified with the velocity of our execution at the scale that we're talking about, no company in history had ever built systems of this complexity. Period, and then to build it once a year is impossible.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“Single Most important property as a company is the installed base of our computing platform. Single most important thing is today is the installed base of CUDA. Now, the reason why 20 years ago, of course, there was no install base. What makes, and if somebody came up with a Gouda or Tuda, it wouldn't make any difference at all.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“Story is true. I didn't dismiss it. But I was deeply honored. And of course I knew then, as I know now, TSMC is one of the most consequential companies in history. And Morris is one of the highest regarded executives and business and personal friend that I've had in my life. For him to ask is I was humbled and really honored. But the work that I'm doing here is really important. And I've seen, you know, in my mind anyways, in my mind's eye, what NVIDIA was going to be and what the impact that we could have. And it was really important work. And it's my responsibility. You know, my sole responsibility to make this happen. And so I declined it, not because it wasn't an incredible offer. It's an unbelievable offer. But I simply couldn't take it.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“Way for starting, wafer stopping, emergency, wafer starts, you know, all of this dynamics of the world's complexity as the world is shape shifting all the time. And somehow they're running a factory with high throughput, high yields, really great costs, excellent customer service. They take their work seriously. When your wafer, because they know that your helping you run your company, when the wafers were promised to show up, the wafers show up so that you could run your company appropriately. And so their system, their manufacturing system is completely miraculous. I would say then the second thing is their culture. This culture is simultaneously technology focused on one hand, advancing technology.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“First of all, the deepest misunderstanding about TSMC is that Their technology is all they have, that somehow they have a really great transistor. And if somebody shows up another transistor, game over. The technology, and of course, you know, I don't mean just the transistor and metalization systems, the packaging, the 3D packaging, the silicon photonics, all of the technology that they have, that technology is really what makes the company special. Their technology makes the company special. But their ability to orchestrate the demands, the dynamic demands of hundreds of companies in the world as they're moving up, shifting out, increasing, decreasing, pushing out, pulling in, changing from customer to customer,”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“The third reason, which is that to recognizing that AI is not just language, these AIs will likely use tools and models and sub agents that were trained on other modalities of information, maybe it's biology or chemistry or laws of physics or fluids and thermal dynamics. And not all of it is in language structure. And so somebody has to go make sure that whether prediction”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“If everything's proprietary, it's hard to do research and it's hard to innovate on top of, around with. And so Open source is fundamentally necessary for many industries to join the AI revolution. NVIDIA has the scale, and we have the motives. To not only skills, scale, and motivation, to build and continue to build these AI models for as long as we shall live. And so therefore we ought to do that. We can open up, we can activate every industry, every researcher, every country to be able to join the AI revolution.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“So, the fact that they contribute more to open source is so sensible because they're probably what are we protecting, you know, mineers, the brothers are in that company, their friends are in that company, and they're all schoolmates, you know, the schoolmate concept. Once schoolmate, your brother for life. And so they... They share knowledge very, very quickly. And so there's no sense keeping technology hidden. You might as well put it on open source. And so the open source community then amplifies, accelerates the innovation process. So you get this rapid, incredible great talent, rapid innovation because of open source and just the nature of friends. And insane competition among the company, what emerges is incredible stuff. And so Is the fastest innovating?”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“Whole bunch of reasons for, well, first of all, let's start with some facts 50% of the world's AI researchers are Chinese. Plus or minus Mostly in China. Still, we have many of them here, but there's amazing researchers still in China. Their tech industry showed up at precisely the right tim The time of the mobile cloud era, their way of contributing with software. And so this is a country's incredible science Really well educated kids. Their tech industry was created during the era of software. Very comfortable with modern software. China is not”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“First of all, you should engineer something from first principles at the speed with speed of light thinking, limited only by physical limits and physics limits. And after that, of course, you would improve it over time.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“And then when you consider it together, you know, you have to make compromises because a system that achieves extremely low latency versus a system that achieves very high throughput are architective fundamentally differently, but you want to know what's the speed of light of a system that achieves high throughput, what's the speed of light of a system that achieves low latency. And then when you think about the total system, you could make trade-offs. And so I force everybody to think about what the first principles, the limits, the physical limits. For everything before we do anything and we test everything against that. And so that's a good frame of mind. I don't love the other methods, which is continuous improvement. The problem with continuous improvement, it”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“Well, first of all, co-design is an ultimate systems engineering problem. And so we approach the work that we do from that principle. The other thing that we do, and this is a philosophy that a thought, a state of mind, I guess, a method that I started thirty years ago and it's called the speed of light. A speed of light is not just about the speed. A speed of light might shorthand for what's the limit of what physics can do. And so everything that we do is compared it against the speed of light. Memory speed, math speed, power, cost, time, effort, number of people, manufacturing cycle time. And when you think about latency versus throughput, when you think about cost versus throughput, cost versus Capacity, all of these things, you test against the speed of light to achieve all of these different constraints separately.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“First of all, Elon is deep in so many different topics, yet he's also a really good systems thinker. And so he's able to think through multiple disciplines. And he obviously pushes things, questions everything, where they're number one. Is it necessary? Number two, does it have to be done this way? And does it have to take this long? And so he has the ability to question everything to the point where everything is down to its minimal amount that is necessary. You can't take anything else out. And yet the necessary capabilities of the product retains. And so he is as minimalist as you could possibly imagine. And he does it at a system scale. I also love the fact that he is represented. He is present at the point of action.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗
“I think, first of all, right now we ought to have everybody understand that when the customer asks for these things, you got somebody in your data center operations team disconnected from the CEO. I bet the CEO doesn't know this. I'm going to talk to all the CEOs. The CEOs are probably not paying any attention to the contracts that are being signed. And so everybody wants to sign the best contract, of course. And they go down to cloud service providers and the contract the two contract negotiators that are you I could just see them now, you know, negotiating these multi-year contracts both sides want the best contract as a result.”
Lex Fridman Podcast23 March 2026Source ↗