Time Magazine has released its 100 Most Influential People List for the year, featuring the likes of Simone Biles, Britney Spears, and crypto pioneer Vitalik Buterin. Among their number is Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA–one of only three tech CEOs included in this year’s list, alongside Elon Musk and Tim Cook.
While NVIDIA is a well-known brand in the gaming industry, with the company’s newest Ampere line of graphics cards still highly coveted and near impossible to obtain, Huang is included in the Time list for the company’s work enabling AI through neural networks.
“The software that enables computers to do things that once required human perception and judgment depends largely on hardware made possible by Jensen Huang,” reads the Time profile written by DeepLearning.AI founder Andrew Ng. “With still emerging AI technologies creating an insatiable hunger for more computation, Huang’s team is well-positioned to keep driving technological advances for decades to come.”
As well as powering gaming and neural networks, NVIDIA’s GPUs are also increasingly being used to mine cryptocurrency, especially Ethereum–whose co-founder Vitalik Buterin was also included on the Influential People list. Their popularity for mining has exacerbated chip supply shortages, with NVIDIA having re-released older cards for mining, while slashing mining performance on new stocks of gaming-focused GPUS.
