Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang does not believe that artificial intelligence poses an existential threat to humanity, no matter how many former AI lab employees sound the alarm. But, if the people working behind closed doors at places like Anthropic or OpenAI really are on the verge of destroying the world, Huang has an idea: shut them down.
In an interview on the Ezra Klein Show, Huang continued to pour cold water on the most doomer-pilled parts of the AI space while also offering a pretty simple and straightforward suggestion to companies who believe their technology is so powerful it could put humans out of business, which is to just not let the genie out of the bottle in the first place.
“If you’re going to build a self-driving car, let’s say it’s a robotaxi, and there’s a really difficult condition. As an engineer, we just have no idea how to solve this problem because these cars are not programmed, they’re trained. So we have no idea how to train these cars, and we have no idea how to align them to the safety standards that are expected on the road,” he said. “What’s the answer? Don’t ship it.”
Huang extended that further, saying that if there is a problem—like, say, AI agent swarms threatening to take over the entire internet, as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei suggested could be possible in a matter of months without a slowdown—that it needs to be solved before a product is made public. And if it can’t be solved, well then you just shouldn’t release the product.
“Now, if [AI labs] say the alternative, which is: There is no way to contain our experiments, there’s just no way; when we test our A.I. models, it will get out, and it will damage the world, then I think the answer is that we have to shut the labs down,” Nvidia’s CEO said.
He also made an explicit point to place agency back in the hands of AI labs that seem so willing to run away from it as they claim that AI developments may be outpacing their own ability to understand or control them. “These are companies with agency. These are CEOs with agency,” Huang said. “If I believe that I’m about to launch a product that is unsafe, it is completely in my ability, my power and my responsibility, and I’m incentivized to do so, to not launch the product.”
Huang has basically landed on the “Don’t Create The Torment Nexus” approach to technological development, which seems like a pretty reasonable conclusion to land on. Unfortunately, when he explains his reasoning for that position, it’s not quite as pro-humanity as one might hope. Instead, it feels like Huang is firmly in the-free-market-is-enough-to-protect-us territory.
“Because the cost to humanity, the damage is too great. The shareholder, the liabilities—it could be civil liabilities, it could be criminal liabilities. I mean, the liability’s incredible,” he said of the reason why labs that pose an existential threat should shut down.
We would have taken human life is worth more than their bottom line, but sure, the risk to the shareholders is one reason not to destroy all of existence. How are they gonna make money if they’re all dead? The math just doesn’t work.
