Nvidia’s Jensen Huang Doesn’t Want to Talk About the Dangers of AI

Last July Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg sat on stage at a conference with Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang, marveling at the wonders of artificial intelligence. The current AI models were so good, Zuckerberg said, that even if they never got any better it’d take five years just to figure out the best products to build with them. “It’s a pretty wild time,” he added, then — talking over Huang as he tried to get a question in — “and it’s all, you know, you kind of made this happen.”

Zuckerberg’s compliment caught Huang off guard, and he took a second to regain his composure, smiling bashfully and saying that CEOs can use a little praise from time to time. He might not have acted so surprised. After decades in the trenches, Huang has suddenly become one of the most celebrated executives in Silicon Valley. The current AI boom has been built entirely on the graphics processing units that his company makes, leaving Nvidia to reap the payoff from a long-shot bet Huang made far before the phrase “large language model” (LLM) meant anything to anyone. It only makes sense that people like Zuckerberg, whose company is a major Nvidia customer, would take the chance to flatter him in public.