President Donald Trump unexpectedly called into a business and technology conference through Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s cell phone and dismissed urgent warnings from those inside the artificial intelligence industry as a “hoax.”
Trump called Huang, who has previously dismissed growing concerns about AI, while he appeared at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles on Monday.
“The robots will not be taking over,” Trump said to the crowd after Huang put the call on speaker. “The AI will not be taking over the rest of the world. The whole thing is a hoax.”
“We have to do things, and we have to do it prudently. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to stop an industry,” Trump added.
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Trump appeared pleased that Huang shared his convictions about the AI industry.
During his brief call, the president doubled down on his view that the U.S. must not lose the AI development race to China. Nvidia, a large tech company that develops computer chips used in AI models, has found itself in the center of the tech race between the U.S. and China as each country tries to lead in the emerging field.
“We’re going to make sure that everybody wins in the AI race in America,” Huang said.
Trump also called for protecting data centers alongside his call to safeguard AI from those trying to slow the pace of the developments.
“Data centers are great, and they make people wealthy,” Trump said.
The president has cast aside dire warnings from tech developers, industry leaders and lawmakers calling for the U.S. government to address the dangers of AI.
Both House and Senate lawmakers plan to discuss and focus on AI this week. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) will be joining forces with former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon on Tuesday to push for “human-controlled AI,” Axios reported.
Earlier on Monday, Trump said he is the only “control or ‘guardrails’” needed for the industry and again pointed to what he deemed a “SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind Chair Demis Hassabis and SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk have all called for independent oversight on AI and slowing development.
Amodei published an essay on Saturday calling for companies to partner with the federal government, which he said could serve as an “evaluator” that implements safety regulations or as a mediator between tech corporations in the process of establishing standards.
The mounting concern over AI spiraling out of control as a result of the race between the industry leaders came to a head when Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher, quit his job and took to social media to issue an urgent warning.
Coxon told The Washington Sun that he felt like he was “contributing to the potential death race” through his work.
Anthropic’s alignment science lead, Evan Hubinger, backed up Coxon’s warning, writing that he believed the company “is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”
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