Trump Phoned Jensen Huang Onstage at the All-In Summit to Call AI Fear a Hoax
Jensen Huang (explore this topic), CEO of Nvidia, was midway through an interview at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles when his phone rang. It was Donald Trump.
Huang put him on speakerphone, and the president opened by noting that Huang can design the most complex computer chip in the world but “can’t figure out how to put you on speaker.”
What followed was a joint rejection of the argument that has dominated the industry for a week.
"The robots will not be taking over. The AI will not be taking over the rest of the world. The whole thing is a hoax," Trump said, according to Axios.
He added that opposition to AI plays into the hands of people who do not want America to succeed:
"That could be political people. It could also be China."
Huang answered:
"We’re not going to let that happen, sir."
The exchange happened in a room where the summit is hosted by the All-In podcast and its investor presenters. The crowd applauded.
The call landed two days after Dario Amodei said the industry must slow down the rate at which model capabilities improve, and Sam Altman matched it within hours, with Elon Musk agreeing as well.
Trump had already dismissed extinction fears outright the week before. On Monday, Huang added his voice to the argument. Except, he didn’t entirely take Trump’s position.
Huang called apocalyptic predictions "not grounded in science," and praised Jacob Coxon, the researcher who quit Anthropic, saying the labs were gambling with our lives, crediting him with "great courage."
He also advised companies to
"pause or pace their work if they feel that their company is out of control."
Huang’s position sits close to what Amodei asked for, distinguishing between a company slowing itself down and an industry-wide brake.
The distinction is a real argument rather than a slogan, and it was not the one the room applauded.
Trump’s China line has a documented kernel and a large gap around it. While OpenAI reported in June that it had found a China-linked campaign using ChatGPT to stir opposition to American data centres, local opposition to data centres is overwhelmingly domestic.
Nobody at the summit asked the obvious question: if slowing down AI benefits Nvidia, which sells the hardware, why isn’t Huang pushing for it?
Story by Ana-Maria Stanciuc
Editor-in-Chief