Only human.
An open letter from some people who play games
A machine is handed a file that tells it who it is. A person has to earn it. This is a letter about Jensen Huang: what he built, what broke, and what we would like to do about it.
Thirty-three years.
November 12, 2026
After thirty-three years, Jensen Huang resigned as CEO of NVIDIA. He had done wrong. He said so himself, in plain words, to the whole company. Four days later he resigned.
It has broken before.
We are not here to argue about that. We are here because this is not the first time something he built has broken. The first time it was a chip, which is a different kind of wrong, and we know it. But that time somebody chose grace, and everything you know about NVIDIA came after.
A booth at a Denny’s.
1993 · San Jose, California
Three engineers and a pot of coffee: Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, Curtis Priem. He had washed dishes at a Denny’s when he was fifteen. Now, just turned thirty, he was starting a company in one.
No name. No money.
They had about $40,000 and no name. They had been saving every file as NV, for “next version.”
“It had all the coffee you could drink and no one could chase you out.”
Three people. Three points.
Almost everything a graphics card draws is built out of triangles. This was the first one.
The perfect curve.
1995 · NV1
NVIDIA’s first chip, the NV1, drew the world in curves: quadratic surfaces, smooth and clever. It was a beautiful idea.
The world chose triangles.
Everyone else, and then Microsoft, chose triangles. Almost nobody built games for curves. And NVIDIA had already promised the same idea to Sega, for its next console.
“After one year of development, we realized our architecture was the wrong strategy.”
He told the truth.
1996 · The ask
As he tells it, he told Sega the chip was the wrong approach.
Then he asked anyway.
That they should find another partner. That NVIDIA could not finish the job. Then the hard part: he asked them to pay anyway, in full, because without it the company was finished.
“I was embarrassed to ask.”
Jensen Huang · 2023
Sega had every right to say no.
Sega said yes.
A Sega executive named Shoichiro Irimajiri backed him. In Jensen’s words, that “understanding and generosity gave us six months to live.”
Grace bought time.
Grace did not do the work. It bought the time. Six months. Not a rescue. A countdown. He laid off more than half the company. That part is not a fairy tale. Then he bet what was left on one more chip: triangles, this time.
A million in four months.
The RIVA 128 sold a million units in four months.
“Confronting our mistake and, with humility, asking for help saved NVIDIA.”
He did not hide that crack.
He put that mistake in a commencement speech. For years he opened staff presentations with the same sentence: “Our company is thirty days from going out of business.” And in July 2026, thirty years on, he thanked Irimajiri in public, on a stage at an arcade in Tokyo.
Then we showed up.
1997 → today · Us
We bought the cards. With summer-job money, birthday money, money we did not really have.
Friday night.
1999
GeForce 256. NVIDIA called it the world’s first GPU. We called it Friday night. Then LAN parties. Drivers at 2 a.m. Benchmarks we ran instead of sleeping.
Our cards. Their boom.
2012
The AI boom started on our graphics cards. AlexNet was trained on a pair of GeForce GTX 580s, the same cards we were buying for fun. Our money had been paying for CUDA through the years Wall Street hated it.
“Video games was our killer app — a flywheel to reach large markets funding huge R&D to solve massive computational problems.”
You are welcome.
2023 → 2025
One trillion dollars. Then two, three, four, five. As late as fiscal 2022, gaming was still NVIDIA’s biggest business. You are welcome. And thank you.
Furious, too.
We have been furious with him, too. Prices. Launches you could not actually buy. Feeling like an afterthought. We said so, loudly, for years. You only stay that angry at someone you are not finished with.
Machines get a file.
SOUL.md
Many AI agents keep a plain text file called SOUL.md. It sets the voice, the values, the limits. Every session starts empty: the agent reads the file and becomes whoever it describes.
Given: a file. Earned: a life.
It is a lovely idea, honestly. Somebody types a personality, hits save, done before lunch. And when the agent gets it wrong, you edit the file and start a new session. It cannot be ashamed of yesterday. It has no yesterday.
A soul is earned.
A person never wakes up fresh. Everything he did yesterday is still true this morning. That is not a flaw in the design. That is the design. It is the only way anyone has ever gotten a soul.
A machine can be reset. A human can only be forgiven.
Fine print, because we are nerds: an agent runs without the file too, and OpenClaw’s template actually tells its agent “You’re becoming someone.” The reading of it here is ours.
It broke again.
November 2026
“I have fallen short.”
“Leading NVIDIA is the privilege of my life. My responsibility is to serve you and be worthy of your trust. I have fallen short of that responsibility.”
Four days later he resigned.
We forgot he is a person.
It is an easy mistake. The jacket never changed. The keynotes ran like clockwork. After a while you start treating the man like one of his products: benchmarked, rated, expected to never drop a frame.
A machine cannot be sorry.
It cannot be ashamed. It cannot lose sleep. He can. He is human, and every human who ever lived has gotten something badly wrong. This was not a wrong chip. It hurt people, and he said that too. We know.
Not a mascot.
A mascot cannot let you down. A person can. He has been a mentor to people he never met, and a hero since the first time a game ran that had no business running. We never wanted a mascot. We wanted the person, and this is what that costs.
We trust him.
Where we stand · 1 of 5
With the part that was ours to hand over: the work. He bet a company on the idea that games mattered, back when that sounded unserious, then showed up for thirty-three years.
We love him.
Where we stand · 2 of 5
Not the way you love a brand. We have yelled at him in comment sections for a quarter of a century. Nobody keeps that up for someone they do not care about.
We forgive him.
Where we stand · 3 of 5
For what is ours to forgive. What is not ours, we leave with the people it belongs to. He asked for privacy for them. Give it to them.
We do not judge.
Where we stand · 4 of 5
We are not a court. We are not a board. We are occasionally a comment section, and we are sorry about that.
We accept. We move on.
Where we stand · 5 of 5
Accepting is not pretending. Forgiveness is not a fresh session. It is keeping the whole history and staying anyway.
Handing one back.
Someone gave him a second chance in 1996. We are handing one back: our part, nobody else’s.
Press and hold. The gold is yours.
Kintsugi is the craft of mending what broke with gold. The repair is not hidden. The piece is kept, cracks and all.
message.md · 0 words · not saved yet
This part is not written yet.
A machine helped build the rest of this page, with a person standing over it. This box is the one part it is not allowed to touch.
The person this place belongs to is finding the words the slow way. Come back.
Only Jensen.
About the name. We mean it both ways: there is only one of him, and he is only human.
Plenty of people can run a company. But the one that started in a diner booth, bet on the wrong shape, owned it, and then spent three decades building on the cards in our PCs? For that job there has only ever been one name. We do not get a vote. We get a voice, and this is what we are using it for.
To NVIDIA’s board
You have a hard job. Remember who built the thing you are protecting. One person led this company from three people and a pot of coffee to where it stands today. We would like him back.
To Jensen
You once told a room of Stanford students you wished them “ample doses of pain and suffering,” because that is where character comes from. This dose was your own doing, and you were the first to say so. We have seen what you do with the hard parts. And if this ever reaches you: the booth is still open. All the coffee you want. Nobody here is going to chase you out.
To everyone else
He is a person. So is everyone in his family. So are you. Disagree with us if you like. Be decent while you do it.
The whole message fits on a napkin
Thank you for the frames.
Thank you for getting it wrong in 1995 and saying so.
Take whatever time a person needs.
Then lead.
We want Jensen leading NVIDIA to greatness again. We will be where we have always been: in the queue, refreshing the page, complaining about the price, and buying it anyway.
Stand with him
Add your name and we will make you a card with your own gold seams. Post it, send it, keep it. No counter, no leaderboard, no petition: we honestly do not know how many of us there are, and we are not going to invent a number. The card is drawn in your browser. Nothing is sent to us; where it goes next is up to you.
So we wrote the file anyway. For the machines.
He never needed a SOUL.md. Your agent gets one. Here is ours: everything this story taught us, in a format a machine can read. It will know the words. It will not have earned them.
Read it before you install it. Then back up the one you have, save this in its place (OpenClaw: ~/.openclaw/workspace/SOUL.md, Hermes: ~/.hermes/SOUL.md), and start a new session.