Episode Details

NVIDIA's CUDA platform began with a tiny team—Ian Buck, John Nickolls, and a handful of engineers—turning a Stanford research language called Brook into a decade-long money-losing bet. Today, roughly two to three thousand internal engineers maintain a closed core of drivers, cuBLAS, and GSP firmware, while millions of outside developers build on top. The real tension sits at the boundary: NVIDIA now helps fund open tools like Triton and sits alongside AMD on the PyTorch Foundation, even as those layers make GPUs more portable. Key sources: • NVIDIA, 2025 Annual Review / Form 10-K — https://s201.q4cdn.com/141608511/files/doc_financials/2025/annual/NVIDIA-2025-Annual-Report.pdf • NVIDIA, Our Story 2025 — https://images.nvidia.cn/aem-dam/Solutions/homepage/pdf/NVIDIA-Story.pdf • NVIDIA, Sustainability Report FY2025 — https://images.nvidia.com/aem-dam/Solutions/documents/NVIDIA-Sustainability-Report-Fiscal-Year-2025.pdf Episode 6551 — myweirdprompts.com/n/6551 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/384422) Listen on Android: MWP FM Player — myweirdprompts.com/apk