Nvidia's founder Jensen Huang has said that too many technology executives with a “God complex” are spreading hysteria about artificial intelligence.
Mr Huang made the comments on the Memos to the President podcast produced by the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) AI think tank based in Washington.
He was asked by SCSP president Ylli Bajraktari about recent polling and concerns from some in the technology sector that there is a stigma starting to linger around AI. Mr Huang, whose company designs graphics processing units and central processing units deemed essential for AI buildout, didn't mince words with his response.
He said the continuing insistence of some that AI will cause a significant labour disruption was “counter-productive, and in fact hurtful”. Although he didn't specifically mention any chief executive by name, Mr Huang paraphrased Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei's projection that AI would “wipe out 50 per cent of new college grad jobs.”
“These kind of comments are not helpful, they're made by, you know, people who are like me, CEOs,” he said, stopping just short of naming Mr Amodei. “Somehow, because they became CEOs they adopt a God complex, and before you know it you know everything,” he continued, adding that he wishes technology executives would be more nuanced in how they discuss AI, job opportunities and regulations as a whole.
“The facts are, AI has created more than half a million jobs in the last couple of years,” he said. “The facts are, AI is our greatest, our best opportunity to reindustrialise the US.”
Mr Huang's comments come just weeks after the Nvidia chief executive had a spirited back-and-forth argument with the technology podcast host Dwarkesh Patel about what he feels are onerous regulations and strict chip export rules that put Nvidia, which is based in the US, at a disadvantage.
For more than a year, Nvidia has intensely lobbied politicians in Washington to be able to export and sell more chips to potential customers in China, a move that some say might compromise US advantages in the AI race. During the podcast, Mr Patel referenced a recent statement made by Anthropic's chief executive that essentially compared AI to enriched uranium.
Mr Huang called that analogy “lunacy”, prompting the podcast host to explain. “AI is similar to enriched uranium, it can have positive uses and negative uses. We don't necessarily want to send enriched uranium to other countries.”
“It's a lousy and illogical analogy,” Mr Huang retorted, insisting that continuing dialogue with researchers and Chinese officials and officials in other countries could prevent nefarious AI use.
In recent months, Nvidia's chief has been on the defensive as both Democrats and Republicans have pushed to limit US chip exports to China.
Though Nvidia's unprecedented profits and prosperity, largely the result of AI, show no sign of slowing down, polling among US residents has shown an increasing reticence for AI, with many of their concerns stemming from fears of labour disruption, energy prices and other possible issues.
