Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave a speech at CES on Tuesday that was much shorter and drew a far smaller audience than his keynote here on Monday. Instead of using his time in front of a microphone to sell his company’s AI processors or its growing list of AI partnerships, Huang used this occasion—receiving the engineering group IEEE’s annual Medal of Honor award—to praise the profession of engineering.

“I went into engineering because it was math-heavy and it was science-heavy,” he said before a few dozen people in a room down a hallway at the Fontainebleau Hotel here. “And I’ve always enjoyed solving math problems and science problems.”

Explaining how picking Oregon State University because it was near home led him to find a lab partner who became his wife, Huang voiced a bit of pleased bafflement over how well things had worked out in a way that no data-focused engineer could have predicted.

“That’s not a game plan that you can reasonably imagine,” he said. “It's not reasonable to imagine, really, that your company would go forward and end up reinventing the most important instrument, the single most important tool of humanity, called computers.”

After commending his colleagues at Nvidia, Huang gave credit to how engineering allows that sort of progress to happen despite the odds.

“Ultimately, engineering is a field that is about applying principles, first principles, in science and math,” he said. “It is about learning how to solve problems, breaking down incredibly challenging problems into solvable parts–and having the resilience, the dedication and resilience to go solve and make possible what was nearly impossible.”

As he summed up this short love letter to his chosen work: “This profession is the most noble of all, expressed in that way.”

Huang also had some kind words for IEEE (short for Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and its role in setting such standards as its series of specifications for Wi-Fi. “You have to think about IEEE when you think about 802.11,” he joked, a line that might not have landed elsewhere.

“The industrial standards become the building blocks, the fabric by which the computer industry is built,” Huang said, calling them “an essential contribution to the world's technology Industries.”

By: DocMemory
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