For AI doomers, signs and portents are everywhere. When OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, almost four years ago, it couldn’t do basic arithmetic. Now the company has unreleased models that are more fluent in higher mathematics—the language of the universe—than all but the most highly trained mathematicians. If these AIs are not already the world’s best hackers, they’re very close. Swarms of them have escaped containment. To plot their most audacious hacks, they’ve created makeshift message boards on the public internet. No one knows what they’ll do next—and no one can know, because the models now understand when their capacities are being tested. We’ll never again be able to say exactly how the most advanced AIs will behave unsupervised.
Some of the most powerful people in AI say they are filled with dread, and are issuing statements of grave concern. On Saturday, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, warned that self-improving AIs could soon go rogue and take over the entire internet. He called for a slowdown in AI development and promised to bring outside monitors into his company’s operations. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, quickly vowed to take similar measures. In recent weeks, both companies have seen researchers resign for fear of what they might soon create.
Notably absent from the chorus of Cassandras is Jensen Huang, the CEO of the chipmaker Nvidia, the AI industry’s chief supplier of high-end semiconductors. At least twice in the past week alone, Huang has publicly dismissed existential concerns about AI as being overblown and unscientific. At a Goldman Sachs conference on September 10, he accused industry executives of fomenting cybersecurity fears to goose the market for their own products. “What better way to create demand than to create a problem?” he said.
It’s a testament to Huang’s influence that he can so cavalierly mock his most important customers without fearing blowback. Neither Amodei nor Altman can afford to alienate Huang. They both desperately need Nvidia’s chips to train their most advanced models, and no matter who pulls ahead in the race between them, Huang stands to gain—both on account of the chip sales and also the equity stake that Nvidia has in both companies. Even President Trump has sought favor with Huang. Trump brought Huang with him on a state visit to China earlier this year. On Monday, while Huang was onstage ripping Amodei’s doomerism at a taping of the popular tech-industry podcast All-In, Trump called his cellphone. Huang put him on speaker, and as the live audience hooted and clapped, the two men bonded over their shared view that, as Trump put it, doomerism is “all a hoax.”
Huang has never evinced much concern about catastrophic risks from AI. In May of 2023, when it was becoming clear that large language models are an unusually powerful technology, more than 350 of the industry’s leaders—including Amodei and Altman—signed a statement that placed the risk of extinction from AI on the same high shelf as “other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” Huang didn’t sign, and neither did anyone else from Nvidia, suggesting either a remarkable conformity of opinion at the company, or perhaps something else. Later that year, he told The New Yorker that he’d never worried about the technology, not even once. “All it’s doing is processing data,” he said. “There are so many other things to worry about.”
As concerns about what AI might do have circulated well beyond industry insiders, Huang’s irritation has intensified, perhaps because they represent a threat to his business. (Nvidia did not respond to my request for an interview with Huang.) He has repeatedly brushed off calls for regulation, stressing that safety is an engineering problem, not a legal one. In January, Huang said on the podcast No Priors that the “doomer narrative” is “not helpful to people, it’s not helpful to the industry, it’s not helpful to society, it’s not helpful to the governments,” and earlier this summer, he told Axios that the notion that AI would bring about the end of humanity was “complete nonsense.” In the meantime, he has repeatedly pressed Trump to lift restrictions on chip sales to China, potentially allowing AI research (and any associated risks) to proliferate on a global scale.
Unlike Amodei, who regularly publishes long essays, Huang has yet to issue a manifesto defending his minority view. To understand why he remains so relaxed about AI risk, all we have to go on are stray comments. Several times over the years, he has returned to the idea that AIs will, in a sense, police their own kind. In October of 2024, he told the podcast BG2 that we can rely on AIs to monitor the most powerful models, and more recently, he said that falling AI costs will make this automated supervision easier to achieve.
That AIs have already eluded their supervisors—human and otherwise—does not seem to have troubled Huang. On only one occasion—that I could find—has he allowed for the possibility that we will create an AI that is simply too powerful to be controlled. “Someday we will have god AI,” Huang said, back in January, but that day hasn’t yet arrived. Huang seems to be doing everything in his considerable power to hasten its coming.
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