SW

Stephen Witt

Things Stephen Says on Podcasts

“I used ChatGPT for the first time on the day it was launched, I think, November 30th, 2022. And I instantly was like, oh my God, my career is over.” — Stephen Witt, Search Engine “The law was actually a law from the CEO of Intel to his employees: you better make this happen. This is the law. This better happen because our whole business model is based on it.” — Stephen Witt, Search Engine “Fei-Fei Li, who ran the competition, when she heard a neural network had won the image recognition competition, and not just won it but crushed it, her words were: it was like learning that the land speed record had been broken by 100 miles an hour by somebody driving a Honda Civic.” — Stephen Witt, Search Engine

Where to Find Them

Stephen Witt has been a guest on TechStuff (4 times) , Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing (2 times) , EconTalk , Why Should I Trust You? , On the Media , The Bulwark Podcast and Search Engine .

Recently: “One man could slow down AI. He won’t. Why?” on Search Engine (October 2026); “Experts Say AI Could Kill Us. Why Should We Trust Them? A Conversation w Jennifer Reich, Stephen Witt & Rachael Bedard” on Why Should I Trust You? (September 2026); “Catherine Rampell and Stephen Witt: Can We Avert Economic Disaster and the Robot Apocalypse?” on The Bulwark Podcast (September 2026); “Humanoid Robots Ship This Year, Here’s What To Expect - The Story” on TechStuff (August 2026); “Nvidia’s Next Big Market” on Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing (May 2026); “The Man Who Built NVIDIA (with Stephen Witt)” on EconTalk (April 2026).

What They Said

“I used ChatGPT for the first time on the day it was launched, I think, November 30th, 2022. And I instantly was like, oh my God, my career is over.” — Stephen Witt, Search Engine

Witt, the author of a biography of Jensen Huang and NVIDIA, is explaining how he came to cover AI. He goes on to say the tool seemed to write as well as he did, for free and in a second, and that he talked to a therapist about it.

Search Engine · 2026-10-16 Permalink → Listen →
Search Engine Around 13:03 into the episode
Stephen Witt

My name is Stephen Witt, and I write about AI and technology. I'm the author of The Thinking Machine, a biography of Jensen Wong and the history of NVIDIA.

PJ Vogt

…written. And Stephen Witt, its author, he's a person who both respects Jensen's mind and ambition and also really disagrees with him about how dangerous AI might be. In fact, the reason Stephen started covering AI years ago was because his first encounter with the technology had scared him so much.

Stephen Witt

I used Chat GPT for the first time on the day it was launched, I think, November 30th, 2022. And I instantly was like, oh my God, my career is over.

PJ Vogt

That was your first thought.

Stephen Witt

Oh, right away. Like, they have a writing machine now, and it writes just as well as me, but it does it for free in one second. Like, I just had this total spiral. I was like, this is horrible. I talked to a therapist about it, actually.

PJ Vogt

Really?

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode
“The law was actually a law from the CEO of Intel to his employees: you better make this happen. This is the law. This better happen because our whole business model is based on it.” — Stephen Witt, Search Engine

Witt is explaining how NVIDIA got ahead of Intel. Moore's Law held for decades because Intel's engineers were made to deliver it, until transistors got so small they ran into quantum effects and the scaling broke down.

Search Engine · 2026-10-16 Permalink → Listen →
Search Engine Around 23:09 into the episode
Stephen Witt

…Now, Jensen doesn't have all those traits, but he has some of them, I think. And I think that's what really allowed him to succeed later in life in business. It prepared him very well to be the CEO. Oh, and by the way, the microchip industry, the semiconductor industry, is an absolute knife fight.

PJ Vogt

…named after a man named Gordon Moore, who'd co-founded Intel, the company that made the processors of the computers my friends and I were obsessed with. Moore's Law was not a law of nature, it was basically a description of how hard Gordon Moore pushed people at his company. Here's Stephen.

Stephen Witt

The way I would put this is: the law was actually a law from the CEO of Intel to his employees: you better make this happen. This is the law. This better happen because our whole business model is based on it. And so, you know, you engineers go bust your ass and figure out a way to make sure this will happen, you know? And those engineers worked very hard and they were very smart and they did make this happen for decades. But what happened ultimately is that the components just got too small. They got so small, they started running into quantum mechanics. And basically, you couldn't shrink them anymore after that because they were starting to leak electricity out of the components and the scaling relationship broke down. Jensen was among the first to see and to understand that that was going to happen. And so you couldn't rely on Moore's Law anymore. You had to find another way to make the microchip faster that wasn't just shrinking the components.

PJ Vogt

Nearly everybody else believed Moore's Law would just go on forever. Jensen didn't. AI. He made a big, confident bet in that direction. His company, NVIDIA, back then did not make CPUs like Intel did. They made graphics cards, what we now call GPUs. And those were really only sold to gamers like…

Stephen Witt

Do you ever wish you could ask nosy questions about people's money? I have $729.71 in my bank account. We bought, you know, a $1.3 million house on a $350,000 income. On the podcast, What We Spend, we ask

Speaker 4

those questions. It's a show about money and all the feelings that come with spending it. I want to be the kind of person who can just take care of the people in my life. Listen to What We Spend, an Odyssey original available now wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode
“Fei-Fei Li, who ran the competition, when she heard a neural network had won the image recognition competition, and not just won it but crushed it, her words were: it was like learning that the land speed record had been broken by 100 miles an hour by somebody driving a Honda Civic.” — Stephen Witt, Search Engine

Witt is explaining how dead neural networks looked as a field before AlexNet, a neural net that ran on an NVIDIA GPU, won the 2012 image recognition competition. Within a couple of years nearly every entry was a neural network.

Search Engine · 2026-10-16 Permalink → Listen →
Search Engine Around 36:37 into the episode
Stephen Witt

…He said, God, if quantum physicists are telling me that they're constrained by computing and I can provide it to them cheaply, it just has to be good. There has to be some way that I'm going to unlock some branch of science somewhere that will ultimately be extremely profitable for my company.

PJ Vogt

…its own. Neural networks would ultimately be the right answer. But the problem was they've been tried and had failed so many times that by the 2000s, the consensus was that they would never work. The handful of researchers still betting on them were given a little more respect than flat earthers.

Stephen Witt

Within AI, neural networks were seen as like a dead technology. So those guys were also mavericks. They were really mad scientists. People did not think biologically inspired software was going to work. They thought it was a joke. I have the 1100-page third edition of the AI standard AI textbook from 2011. It's 1,100 pages long. It looks like the phone book. There's 16 pages in there about neural networks. Oh, wow. Like you could get a degree in AI and not ever touch a neural network. You could be a PhD and never use a neural network. In fact, most PhDs would only have limited experience with them. And PhD advisors would have discouraged you strongly from pursuing any research in this technology, which was seen as antiquated and which was seen as dead. But an ACE programmer named Alex Krushevsky coded a neural net called AlexNet that ran on the GPU. And that was the one that all of the AI scientists saw, and there was a mass conversion immediately. So the year that he entered his neural network into the image recognition competition, it was the only neural network…

PJ Vogt

And how quickly does NVIDIA become aware of this? How quickly does it change his company's fortune? Like when does the wind reach his sale?

Stephen Witt

The wind reaches his sales when Hampton's group, Jeffrey Hinton and Alex Prudievsky, get aqua hired by Google. And they come in and Google at that time has the largest platform of computers, probably outside of a government platform in the world. This giant distributed cluster of CPUs. And those…

Speaker 4

Welcome to GTC 2014. This is what started it all. CUDA and the invention of GPU computing launched this event. As I was showing up this morning, a good friend said, This is the Woodstock for computational mathematicians. I hope it turns out the same way. I hope it turns out the same way.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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