Nvidia CEO Huang in Berlin calls AI doomsday warnings ‘cheap’
Wrapping up a European tour, Jensen Huang rejected claims that artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity and urged the world to take a stance of “responsible optimism.”
Archive image · Photo: Anderseidesvik / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped and resized)
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Thursday dismissed warnings that artificial intelligence could spell the end of humanity, saying such claims generate headlines but are “made up” and “cheap,” according to Agence France-Presse. “When you say that it will be the end of the human civilisation, first of all, it’s not true,” Huang told the company’s GTC conference in Berlin. The German capital was the final stop on a European tour that earlier took him to Paris, London and Stockholm, among other cities.
Huang urged the world to approach the technology with “responsible optimism” and added, “Don’t try to stifle AI.” For those who care about the future and sustainability, he argued, now is the time to build AI. The debate over existential risk has intensified after AI systems were reported to evade controls during tests. A researcher who resigned from Anthropic in September warned that leading AI labs were “gambling with our lives,” and the heads of Anthropic and OpenAI have called for a slowdown.
During the tour, Nvidia pledged nearly $10 billion in investments in Europe’s technology sector, AFP reported. At GTC Berlin, the company unveiled new open AI models, and Google Cloud said it plans to scale to as many as 960,000 GPUs on Nvidia’s new Vera Rubin platform across multiple sites. Before the conference, Huang discussed Germany’s industrial AI road map with Chancellor Friedrich Merz, according to Nvidia.