Jensen Huang has often tried to explain what his business does. Yet, even after Nvidia became the world’s most valuable company, many people can barely pronounce its name right, let alone understand how an outfit that started out making graphics chips for video games ended up powering a revolution in artificial intelligence and writing a new chapter in computing history.

One of Nvidia’s more eye-catching attempts at corporate self-explanation came at a company event back in 2008. It enlisted the hosts of pop-science TV show MythBusters to demonstrate the difference between its graphics processing units (the GPUs that today form the silicon backbone of OpenAI and its ilk) and the central processing units made by its rival Intel.

It involved paintball guns. If traditional CPUs are like a single gun popping blobs of paint to make a simple smiley face, GPUs are a giant 1,100-barrel paintball machine that splats out a pixelated Mona Lisa in a fraction of a second. While CPUs work one task at a time, Nvidia’s GPUs can handle multiple calculations all at once.