The Father of AI Was a Black Scientist 🤯

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1:32I love the way you present it and I'm like, yes, okay. I'm right. I'm taking notes right here. Thank you. Thank you. So this is vitally important. So, okay, Lisa Blackwell. So, all right, some backstory. If you follow NVIDIA, you know that they, every year they come out with a new chip and they named the chip after a historical figure, like one of the top scientists in the world, somebody that has contributed to artificial intelligence, somebody that, you know, like a pioneer in this space. Last year, Chip was named Blackwell. So Blackwell before, Ruben is this year. Ruben hasn't come out yet.

2:09So currently Blackwell is the most advanced chip ever created. Now, the interesting thing is that Blackwell was named after David Blackwell. David Blackwell is Lisa's grandfather. Correct. This is a very interesting story. And we're going to play a visual to talk about it. But before we play the visual, can you just cue up? Can you cue this up for us? Sure. Sure. So you're about to see 10 minutes of what is a concept reel for the documentary that we're creating about my grandfather's story. And it really has a little bit of the sort of linchpin that everything turned around on, like when I start digging into the story and what I discovered.

3:02And you guys are getting ready to see sort of what that looks like. And again, this is the concept reel for the documentary. Let's play it, shall we? Let's do it. Okay. National Medal of Science II, David Blackwell, University of California, Berkeley. I would like to introduce you to a very, very big GPU named after David Blackwell. For fundamental contributions to probability theory, mathematical statistics, information theory, mathematical logic, and Blackwell games. David Blackwell was a great amongst greats. He was the great, great, great mathematician among great mathematicians. Blackwell was a pioneer who was ahead of his time.

4:00I thought I knew my grandfather. Eggs at dawn, martinis at dusk, and a 5 % dividend man all the way. Years later, NVIDIA named their platform Blackwell. That's when I started digging and discovered my grandfather, Professor Blackwell, architect of the mathematics behind artificial intelligence.

4:34A lot of his ideas really cause people to rethink how do we interpret data. There are many, many standard tools that people use all the time that are named after David. You know, Blackwell spaces and the Raoul-Blackwell theorem. Blackwell nowadays is known for what's called the Blackwell-Raoul theorem. Sort of like saying if something happens frequently enough, you should be able to kind of predict what's going to happen next. However, there might be some bias in some of that data. That's essentially what the Blackwell-Raoul theorem tells you, is that there's a way you can kind of estimate what should happen, but then minimize the bias that you would have there in the data.

5:20And this is an amazing approach to doing statistics. If Blackwell were alive today, he would certainly be the one to raise up his hand and say, you know, look, there's bias in AI. There's bias in the training data that we're using. And we really need to think about minimizing these as more and more people use these models. I was very clear that I was going to be a schoolteacher. My father had a friend who was on the school board, and before I finished high school, he already told my father that if I went to college and got a degree, he would get me a job teaching. And this was in the Depression, and it was a great relief to me and everybody else when it was clear what my future was going to be.

6:10After I got my bachelor's degree in three years, I decided to spend my fourth year getting a master's degree. But then at the end of my fourth year, I was encouraged to apply for a fellowship to go on for a Ph.D., and I did. And then, of course, my objective changed. There were perhaps 25 awards. Twenty-two of them required teaching assistant responsibilities. Three of them were pure fellowships. And everybody applied for both things, and the lucky three got the fellowships. And one of my colleagues who also applied told me that I was going to get one of the fellowships. and I said how do you know and he said well they're good enough to be supported and they're not going to put you in front of a classroom and he was right they were not going to put you in front of a classroom because because I'm black

7:36David, you know, he was a black mathematician, and there are no black mathematicians that would that it were, but there are very few anyway. What was it like to be David Blackwell? I never could get him to talk about that. anything about what his experiences were. In Berkeley he had the problems of not being hired in the 1950s because the wife of the chairman of the Berkeley math department said well I wouldn't want to see us hire somebody that I couldn't invite to my home. Yet Jersey Naiman realized that David Blackwell was David Blackwell and did hire him over these awful people's dead bodies but But to try to get David to tell any story of that sort, he just wasn't a negative person.

8:40My grandfather came to UC Berkeley in 1954. That was the same year that the Brown versus the Board of Education came down, 1954. And my grandparents are driving across the country with their seven kids with the green book. There was this book that they had to use to get across the country so they knew where they could sleep. Safe places that they could sleep. Then when he got here, he wasn't offered the customary hospitality. And so he went, and they didn't have housing. They slept in Tilden Park for two months. and he would go commute and teach at the school. Seven children.

9:28When we traveled, and we did travel a lot in the car, in the station wagon, when we would travel, he would have a map and he would give each of us a map and he would have gasoline estimates, time estimates for how long it was going to take us, estimates for how long we'd go to the bathroom, estimates for what the traffic was going to be. But along the way, he kept us all engaged at our own level. And it was remarkable to have children 10 years apart, one is very young, the other one is much more mature, and still keep them all engaged. They somehow felt equal to the challenge. It was just reflective of his considerate manner of teaching.

10:14Your grandfather was the most delightful, friendly, warmest person. I just remember him with a smile on his face.

10:30All the years I had heard people talk about David Blackwell, they never talked about him being angry or bitter. Most importantly, they never talked about him saying anything negative. about anyone else. And that, I think, truly is a testament to his character. That's what I strive to do, is to really say, maybe things have happened negatively, but let me not try to dwell on that. Let me try to move forward to say, what are positive things that are happening, and what are ways that I can make this world a better place?

11:05You have arrived at a developers' conference. There will be a lot of science described, algorithms, computer architecture, mathematics. In March last year, NVIDIA unveiled its most ambitious GPU architecture. We named it Blackwell in honor of Dr. Blackwell. Today we're witnessing the dawn of the AI era, and the Blackwell architecture is the engine that's powering the AI. this new industrial revolution. We strive each day to honor Dr. Blackwell's remarkable legacy by bringing the promise of AI to industries, developers, and researchers worldwide. Specifically to African-Americans, I would say don't consider your race as a handicap.

12:01If you want to go in a direction, go in that direction. In other words, make decisions on the same basis just as if you were Chinese or white or anything else. Don't worry so much about race. It's going to be a factor, but let other people worry about it. Don't you worry about it. David Blackwell was the epitome of excellence. We had a booth at a math conference. An individual walked by. He wasn't a black mathematician. He pauses at the table, looks at the picture of Blackwell and is very confused, and then says, you know, I'm a statistician, but that picture can't be right. David Blackwell wasn't black.

12:53So I asked him, so how are you convinced that he wasn't black? And he said, well, there's this Blackwell-Rowell theorem, and it's an amazing theorem. it just never crossed my mind that Blackwell could be black. So imagine if David Blackwell didn't have to be hidden 50 years ago. If he wasn't hidden 50 years ago, what would STEM look like today? What's it going to look like tomorrow if we don't uphold his face and those like him?

13:41Yes. Wow. There you have it.

13:48Thank you. That was amazing. It's incredible. Watching it, talking to you, getting to know you over the past few months has just been incredible. The chat is going crazy. You know, we don't need a month or we don't need a day to celebrate our history. We make history every day. And I'm so happy that you put this together. And just for full context for people, like, you know, it's interesting because we talk about AI so much. And who really knew that one of the forefathers of artificial intelligence was black and held in such high regard in the world of science that the largest company in the history of the world, which is NVIDIA, named their most advanced piece of software ever after a black man.

14:38And once again, it just goes back to, I think you said this at NVIDIA, if he was well known, what would that do to stem in our community? Because we aspire to be things that we see success in. So we aspire to be athletes and entertainers because we see success in that. It's not just because we're talented in athletics and entertainment we are but we're also talented in math and science but we don't see we don't we haven't we haven't been exposed to that so that's not something that we aspire to be but what if what if his story was so well known how would that potentially change the trajectory of young people wanting knowing that artificial intelligence was practically started by somebody that was black Yeah.

15:21Yeah. Lisa, it, it, you know, we, we had this call and just, I mean, when we talk about relationships early in the show, this is just one of these relationships that was kind of just like God, right? Like I remember we, we had a call and it got emotional for a sec because unbeknownst to you, we were already going to NVIDIA shout out to our brother Tui. And I know Noel's on the check-in. They were like, Hey, Troy, there's this person that you guys should meet. I think she would be incredible. I'm like, who is this person? I saw the deck. I'm like, Oh, this is, this is a great story but when we connected i it was fresh off an invest fest and i was like there was this message that i got from my brother marcus rosier about you know being who you're going to be so somebody else can be who they're going to be and when i relayed that message to you i said yes jensen and chris the co-founders of nvidia named the chip blackwell they did their part they may not have told his story but they did their part so that we could now do our part i want to know what this moment feels like for you, obviously being on the campus, being there, meeting the co-founder.

16:23What was this moment like for you?

16:29You know, I want to say that this moment right now is bigger to me than that moment. This moment to me is bigger because this is my community. This is who my grandfather cared about. And these are the people I care about. And so this is bigger. And to see their excitement about this, this moves me in a way I cannot express. But to answer your question directly, it was interesting. It's a full circle moment in so many ways because I just want to put a finer point on something you said earlier where NVIDIA has a history of naming their products after accomplished scientists and things like that.

17:22Well, Vera Rubin, who's the next one, she's actually an astronomer. And then another person, like they're just different people who have made profound contributions to science. he's the only one who's really done something in ai specifically and part of the reason is there are only a few of them and most of them just like claude shannon is one and i'm i think that's what claude is named after but so we came in there and saw what they had what they're creating with his work. It's just so powerful, but it's also something else because nobody knows that he was there doing it, you know? So it's two things at once.

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