Can we trust NVIDIA's Jensen Huang…. as per the AI doomsday narrative?

That's a funny question, isn't it? A man runs the highest capitalized company in the world ($5.19 trillion, and counting), keeps delivering triple-digit earnings CAGR, the likes of which we've hardly seen (despite its size), sits on about 75% gross margin (again, despite its size) in its hyper growing GPU industry which it dominates with a market share of over 70%, has delivered 3-year Total Return to shareholders in excess of 380% and you're asking that question? Get outta here!

But, hold your breath there. Background! There's a current narrative about AI having the potential to 'literally' kill all of humanity (yes, literally), amongst other rogue dangers. Dario Amodei, of Anthropic, issued a lengthy missive to jumpstart the discussion, urging restraint and caution on the bewildering speed of "out-of-control" AI agents and their capabilities by asking industry players to consider "pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up". His fellow frontier AI agent creators, Sam Altman and Elon Musk, all nodded in agreement.

Then, straight out of left field came a blistering attack from NVIDIA's Jensen Huang on those claims by Dario and the others. First in September, he said it all amounted to scaring people and "Scaring people is unnecessary. It is irresponsible". He went further that the doomsday scenarios are "not grounded in science". And to further cap it…. he said in Berlin early this month that the doomsday warnings are "cheap" attempts to "grab headlines". These are absolute, sweeping statements! No nuance!

Whatever side of the divide you stand, his response comes across as a trivialized diatribe over a serious issue that needed a more professional response. The dismissive language adopted by Jensen goes beyond just intellectual or philosophical disagreement but attacks the integrity of the claim and those sounding it. These are the guys who actually run (create) the laboratory of AI agents. Mind you, these guys hardly agree on anything.. but this one.

Let's be clear, NVIDIA's Jensen is immensely qualified to comment on AI issues simply because he creates the best hardware 'containers' that power the best of the AI world, but that's it. He effectively only runs the production of the chips that the guys referenced above use to power process their agents. So, who has authoritative commentary on the extent and probabilities of AI danger: the guys who create the content or the "container" manufacturers? The guys who own the content say there is danger and the guy who only creates the hardware container says, it's not true. Uhmmm! And anyone who has related with any of these AI agents only needs to stretch some fertile imagination to see the yet-no-boundary good and evil that can come out of them.

Jensen Huang has denied any accusation that his comments are not self-serving as his company would benefit from the limitless expansion of the AI footprint. We believe him!

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