"Our lives, our history are very close, and Korea has always been a very close part of my heart."
That was Jensen Huang on an episode of tvN's You Quiz On The Block, which aired last week in South Korea and marked the first time the Nvidia founder and CEO had ever sat down for a variety talk show, anywhere in the world.
The episode had been one of the most anticipated bookings of the year, and the hype had been building for weeks. Huang landed in Korea on June 5 for a five-day visit, and his every move drew crowds and cameras — from a stop at a Hongdae internet cafe to a dinner of pork belly and soju with the heads of tech-related conglomerates SK, LG and Naver.
The You Quiz episode, filmed in advance on June 5, arguably handed Huang his widest audience yet. Hosted by Yu Jae-seok, the comedian who has been the face of Korean television for the better part of two decades, the show sits down with guests for a casual chat and ends each segment with a trivia question for cash.
It has been a go-to stop for global stars passing through Seoul, among them Timothee Chalamet, Zendaya, Scarlett Johansson and, most recently, Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway.
Huang was the last guest of the night, so viewers had to wait until the very end to get to him. Once he was on, he wasted no time talking up his ties to Korea, which he traced back roughly 25 years.
"Without all of the amazing gamers here, like Faker and so many others, Nvidia's technology would not be a global phenomenon," he said.
Huang also made clear he was rooting for Nvidia's Korean partners across the board.
"When I'm here in Korea, I want my partners to succeed. I want SK to succeed, I want Samsung to succeed, I want LG, I want Hyundai, I want Naver to succeed, and they know that," he said. "I will do my best work I can and I will give you 100%."
Then came a trickier question. Asked which of the three executives behind last year's "Kkanbu summit" — the impromptu fried chicken dinner he had with Samsung's Lee Jae-yong, Hyundai Motor's Chung Euisun and SK's Chey Tae-won — he was best friends with, Huang played it diplomatically.
"They're all incredible, world-class leaders," he said. "All three companies are very fortunate to have them."
There was plenty of his life story, too. Huang recalled immigrating to the United States from Taiwan at nine and having to wash dishes and clean bathrooms at a restaurant. Whatever the job, he said, he gave it everything: "The topic doesn't matter. When you finished, it represents you."
He returned again and again to the value of resilience. "When you have nothing, you also have nothing left to lose, and that's a very powerful person," he said, recalling the mid-1990s stretch when Nvidia came within weeks of going under.
On how artificial intelligence will change ordinary people's lives, Huang kept it simple: "AI is easy, computer is hard." Today's machines, he argued, are smart enough that you just tell them what you need, which means "AI closes the technology divide."
He pointed to the mum-and-pop owners at a barbecue restaurant he had visited the night before. "They were so nice, they could be programmers," he said. "If they would like to create a new website, if they would like to create a new application, it's easy — tell the AI to help you do that."
True to the show's format, the chat was broken up by "balance games," or forced this-or-that picks. Asked to choose, for the rest of his life, between samgyeopsal (pork belly) and fried chicken, Huang was torn.
"Until last night, it was easy to decide," he said, but the pork belly he had the night before was too good to rule out. "This is a choice I cannot make." – The Korea Herald/ANN
