Nvidia CEO Jensun Huang critiques 'well respected people who have painted a doomer narrative' around AI right after saying 'I guess someday we will have God AI'

You know Nvidia, the AI gaming hardware company that managed to hit a $5 trillion evaluation last year. The AI boom has led to ever-increasing investment into the company, and so it's really in Nvidia's interest for the world to be all in on the potential benefits of AI.

Huang reflects on the AI naysayers in a recent interview with No Priors (via Business Insider). The Nvidia leaders and No Priors hosts Elad Gil and Sarah Guo venture down a lot of paths during the nearly 80-minute conversation, including what happens to jobs under an AI future, and when we might see a 'god AI'. One key point is the various narratives around the ethics of the machine learning tech.

Huang argues the world of the future is one where AI leads to more jobs: "People say, 'gosh, all of these robots that we're talking about. It's going to take away jobs'. As we know very clearly, we don't have enough factory workers. Our economy is actually limited by the number of factory workers we have." Huang therefore argues that robotics will lead to a huge repair industry, and that will naturally lead to more jobs.

Huang elaborates that, under the new age of AI, tasks and jobs are different things. He clarifies this point with a few different analogies throughout the chat, explaining that a waiter's job isn't just to collect orders but to give customers "a great experience". He says the goal of Nvidia software engineers is to solve problems, "and we have so many undiscovered problems". Huang adds that nothing would give him more joy than if none of his software engineers were coding, explaining 'If Nvidia was more productive, it doesn't result in layoffs. It results in us doing more things.'

However, it's not just job concerns that Huang gestures at here. He says, "There are… many people in the government who obviously aren't as familiar with, as comfortable with the technology, and when PhDs of this and CEOs of that goes to governments and explain and describe these end-of-the-world scenarios and extremely, extremely dystopian future, you have to ask yourself, 'What is the purpose of that narrative and what are their intentions and what do they hope? Why are they talking to governments about these things to create regulations to suffocate startups?"

Elad Gil asks if Huang believes the point of this is regulatory capture—an attempt to stop startups from competing effectively through regulations—but Huang says he doesn't know. Huang instead admits "a lot of very sensible things are being said" by doomers (ie, those who are pessimistic about the future of AI) but he also clarifies that "When 90% of the messaging is all around the end of the world and the doom and the pessimism and you know, I think we're scaring people from making investments in AI that make it safer, more functional, more productive, and more useful to society."

Huang says, "I think we've done a lot of damage with very well respected people who have painted a doomer narrative. End of the world narrative. Science fiction narrative."

As with much of the AI industry, there's a bit of a 'better to ask forgiveness than permission' narrative here, from the likes of Meta and OpenAI scraping as much material as possible, to entirely ignoring copyright, to claims that AI will solve the global warming problems that are partially caused by AI's explosive growth. There's also a rapid building of infrastructure and trillions of dollars invested into the technology that's been setting off some folks 'tech bubble' spidey sense for some time.

This isn't helped by the volume of buzzwords bandied around the tech, either. Mere minutes before talking about naysayers, Huang says, "I guess someday we will have God AI. That someday is probably on biblical scales, you know, I think galactic scales."

In a basic sense, he's describing one monolithic model that does everything, But even Huang has his doubts:

"I don't think any company practically believes they're anywhere near God AI, and nor do I see any researchers having any reasonable ability to create God AI. The ability to understand human language and genome language and molecular language and protein language and amino acid language, and physics language all supremely well. That God AI just doesn't exist."

Well, if God AI is coming, I don't think I'll be a believer.