Jensen Huang: The Doomer Hoax, Superintelligence Is Here, and The Future of AI (ft. President Trump)

16:28Jensen Huang:The world needs both closed models and open models. You want to use, I use as much closed models as I can. This weekend I used four of them. And they work terrifically. They're a frontier. They're a great experience. They work incredibly well. They're getting better all the time. And the way I think about closed models is kind of like bottled water, you know? Water is free, you guys. I don't know if I've told you guys, but water is free. I don't want to, you know, burst everybody's bubble. But water is free. And this morning I used a lot of free water taking a shower. And so you use the right water in the right places.

17:06Jensen Huang:And this is no different than electricity. This is no different than all kinds of commodities that we use in the world. You need both. Now, in the case of open, the reason why you need it is because it could be for sovereignty reasons, privacy reasons, proprietary technology reasons. Look at the facts. The facts are, in the last six months,$400 billion of venture funding went into AI native companies. 80 % of them use Open Models. If not for Open Models, how could they build their dream? Because their dream could be different. Obviously, it would be different than the labs, the Frontier Labs dreams.

17:45Jensen Huang:And America has so many different ways to innovate. That's one of our core strengths. Great ideas just coming out of the fountain. And so Open Models enables that. Open Models enables every single... If we want to win the AI race, It's not about a few technology companies winning the AI race. It's about every company in America, every company, every industry, every researcher, every teacher, every student, every startup. Everybody wins. Some of them will use closed models. A lot of them will use open models. There's 10 million. Does it matter if the open models come from China or the U.S.? Well, we're doing everything we can to make a contribution in open models.

18:34However, the moment you download, like for example, probably the vast majority of the world's contribution to open source today is coming from China.

18:44Jensen Huang:They just have a lot more engineers. They produce everything in large scale because it's a larger country. And so they produce science and math students in volume. That's one of our disadvantages. They're manufacturing them through amazing universities like Tsinghua University in high volume. Well, they contribute open source today. We download Linux. We download Kubernetes. We download all the software. A lot of it has been touched by Chinese. And once you download it, it's yours. We fork it. We improve it. We make it ours. And so when you download one of these Chinese models, it just happens to be made by some really great researchers in China.

19:23But it's now yours.

19:25Jensen Huang:Whatever you want to do with it. So what exactly is the race? The race? Yeah. I think that's a really good point. My point is the race is really about who exploits the technology best. You know, the last industrial revolution, all of the inventors were Maxwell, Volta, Ampere. None of them were American. They were, right? The last industrial revolution came from Europe. But we exploited it. We took advantage of it socially better than anybody else in the world. And look how it turned out for us. I want to make sure that this next generation happens just like this. Yeah, yeah. So why are the communists getting their message out so successfully here right now?

20:14Jensen Huang:You know, I think, first of all, the narrative is much more practical. The narrative is much more practical. Nobody's in China is saying that there's end of this and end of that and, you know, cataclysmic this and, you know. Doom or that. Doom or that. They're much more pragmatic about it. They see AI as a technology that's going to advance their economy, advance their society. And they don't have these groups who are basically saying it's going to end civilization. And we're making it up. The part that is frustrating is if it was true, if it was true, then we ought to talk about it and go do something about it.

20:51Jason Calacanis:Right.

20:51Jensen Huang:Even if it's true, we ought to spend more time doing something about it than worrying a bunch of people who can't do anything about it. It's our job to build it right. Has there ever been a point in history where so many people have so vehemently said something that is so untrue? And they're measurably, they're actually demonstrably untrue. And it actually makes sense it's untrue. It's not based on science. It's not based on research. Everything that's based on science and research proves otherwise. Is it a fear of the frontier? Humans have never been there, we've never seen it, therefore we're scared of it?

21:24And therefore it's easy to tell everyone to be scared of it?

21:26Jensen Huang:It could be life experience as well, David. So let me give you an example. When I first graduated from school, I was an engineer and I didn't do that much typing. And the reason for that is because I was the first generation before software became popular. We had to go build the computers to make software possible. Could you imagine in this generation, every single engineer who came into the world of engineering, you spend all your time typing. Literally, that's what you do. When you get a job, they give you a laptop, they give you a chair, and you start typing. You type all day long. You type from the moment you wake up to the moment.

22:04Jensen Huang:Well, there was engineering before typing. And so can you imagine that the world has a mountain of engineering work to do where most of it is not typing anymore? Sure. We had busy engineers before typing, I think we're going to do a lot of great engineering after typing. When I say typing, I mean coding. So even at NVIDIA, when software engineers talk to me, I tell them, you're just typing. I've been saying that forever, but obviously for fun. And I tell them, my favorite key is backspace. And the reason for that is because the best software is the smallest software. So I want you to use backspace as often.

22:47Jason Calacanis:Let's actually talk about NVIDIA. Let's do a little teardown of NVIDIA. So teardown meaning just explain the pieces, because there's a lot of strategy at play. Let's start at the absolute bottom. Oh, no.

23:03Jason Calacanis:This is not planned, but we know who it is.

23:05Jensen Huang:Oh, no. No. Mr. President? Oh. Yes, sir. I got to tell you something. if it wasn't because of you calling I'm on stage with the besties I'm on stage with the besties I'm on stage with the besties I'm on stage with Sax the whole group Jason's here, Chamat's here, Dave and David is here I'm sitting in front of a few thousand people and we're talking as it turns out we were talking about you

23:48Jensen Huang:good job sir good job the fact that you saw through all of that i mean there's a lot of complexity and the fact that a matter you saw through all of that and and i you know we're all just really grateful tell him i said hi do you want to say hi to the crowd jason would like jason would like to put you on the even jason speaker mode how do we put how do we put on potus Put him on speaker? Speaker, yeah. Right into the microphone. Hang on a second, sir. Hold on, sir. We're getting a microphone. Mr. President, you're now talking to the planet. You see, the great thing about life is that Jensen can develop the most complex computer chip in the world that nobody can copy for 10 years, but he can't figure out how to put me on speaker.

24:36That's it.

24:39We have to remember this one. So, it's almost this conspiracy and the happiest group is China and China is very happy. And I could even say in the country, a lot of states are happy that weren't going to get anything because they're being inundated by people that want to be there. But now all of a sudden you see they're building in Finland. They want to build one Google wants to build a big one in Finland, which I'm not happy about because they were unable to get permitting. and I'm telling you it's all a hoax. The data centers are great and they make people wealthy and they make states wealthy and it's the oil of the next 20, 25 years.

25:19It's bigger than the internet and the AI, you know, much more so. And they're just playing right into the hands of a lot of people that don't want to see it happen and that could be political people and it could also be China. And we're not going to let that happen. It's a hoax.

25:37Jensen Huang:You're right. We're not going to let that happen, sir. No, we're not going to let it happen. The robots are not going to be taking over the world, and that's not going to happen. You know, my uncle was the top, probably maybe the best of all time, frankly, but professors at MIT for 41, 42 years, and known as being one of the most brilliant men. And he was there for 41 years as the top. He was like at the top, top of the ladder, top of did many things. Jensen knows all about it, but did many things. So I have a little genetic, a little genetic strength, if you believe in the race theory. But I do.

26:17I have genetics.

26:18Jensen Huang:That explains why you know so much about AI. Well, I know about AI. I know I also have common sense about AI. The robots will not be taken over. The AI will not be taken over the rest of the world. The whole thing is a hoax. now with that we have to be a little bit careful we have to very be you know we have to do things and we have to do them prudently but that doesn't mean we're going to stop an industry because you know as we work on the next 10 years about how to destroy it so i'm with you all the way i didn't even know how you felt about it i assumed you felt the same way as me yes and we if we're going to lead and i have an expression it's whoever wins ai wins that's how big it is it's bigger than the internet.

27:01And whoever wins, AI wins, and we can't let this kind of stuff happen. And that includes, very much includes data centers. There are communities that were dying that have data centers right now, and now they're wealthy communities. Really wealthy communities.

27:14Jensen Huang:We're going to make sure that everybody wins in the AI race in America. Every industry, every company, every state, every people. Good. Well, I feel strongly about it, and I have the position that can do something about it. We're not going to let that stuff happen. So I have no idea who's at the meeting. I have no idea who the hell I'm talking to, but I'll see you. Did you hear that? Did you hear that? Thousands of people are clapping for you, sir. I know. All I know, if you're there for me, you're going to listen to Jensen, but he's done an amazing job, and David has done an amazing job, and good luck to everybody, and we're going to stay with the future.

27:57The country has never done better. We have$20 trillion of investment coming into the country. And that's as opposed to much less than$1 trillion under sleepy Joe Biden. And that was for four years. This is in one year. So, you know, it's really the country is the country has never seen anything like it. And we're going to keep it going. And so thank you all very much.

28:19Jensen Huang:Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you. I'll call you back later. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you. um well that was unique i thought it was a bit did you know that was happening i thought it was a bit yeah that was awesome i thought it was like no it's real i thought it was a bit at first and i was like put him on speakerphone wow and he calls you well how do you how do you he calls you any hour at the night right well we were we were in the uh we were in the oval that time when he called

28:47Jason Calacanis:you i was sleeping i was you were asleep and he like said wake him up i felt so bad because he's like, who's coming to this dinner? And we go through the list. He's like, well, what about Jensen? I said, no, sir. He's on vacation because he had to postpone this vacation for five years. And he's like, get him on the phone. What's vacation? But why do you think he sees through the hoax? This is the thing. It is really quite an extraordinary thing. It's polling minus 80. So for anyone else that's sitting in the Oval Office, you're going to do what's popular. You're representing the people. This is what everyone wants.

29:20They want to shut down the data centers and AI. It seems to be the popular thing in the moment, but he says it's a hoax, and he calls it. How does he do that?

29:29Jensen Huang:I got to tell you, I'm not sure. And the reason for that is because a lot of people are falling for it. And so the fact of the matter is it's complicated. You know, at first, I mean, if you look at the story, if you look at the stories, it's all anchored on two things. The first thing that it was anchored on was national security. And recently, that was all blown to bits. And so So that story is no longer anchored on national security. Now it's anchored on safety. Now, if you want AI to be safe, the first thing is we need to make sure that the labs that are building it are in control, that they're good tests for them.

30:02Jensen Huang:If we would like to have third parties to make sure that a third party evaluator, third party evaluators are available, that's no different than financial control. You guys know we have auditors, and the auditors are quite, they don't have to be as expert as we are in our business, but they just have to ask the right questions. And I think I heard somebody say that it's good to have independent auditors or evaluators, but they just have to have multiple. I agree with that, too. Just as there's multiple evaluated and auditors, it makes sure that one company doesn't become, you know, pilled or somehow influenced for whatever reason.

30:40Jensen Huang:And so, you know, there's a lot of different ways that you could solve this. And so I think the number one thing is let's build the technology safely. Let's make sure that the testing of it is safe. And I recognize completely that what is being built is extraordinary. But these are extraordinary companies, and we ought to hold them to extraordinary standards. And they want to be. And they want to be. I wanted to go back to open source for a second. and a year ago, we weren't taking it very seriously. It was two years, 18 months behind. The one thing that, as you guys know, one of the challenges when you're on the call with President Trump is hard to say something.

31:24Jensen Huang:I'm gonna get in trouble for that, I'm sure. He's gonna call me up on that. But anyhow, what I was gonna tell him and all of you is that AI is creating an enormous number of jobs. The thing that he wanted more than anything at the beginning of the administration and my first phone call with him, my first time I met him, is he wants to create jobs in America. He wants to re-industrialize the United States. He wants to make sure that the United States has the energy to support the next industrial revolution. Without energy, there's no industrial growth. And so he wants to make sure that there's energy growth, that there's job growth, that we're re-industrializing the supply chain.

32:02Jensen Huang:Look at everything that we're doing right now. All of it is happening right now as we speak. We're creating more jobs than ever. We're creating software jobs. We were just talking about earlier,$400 billion of venture financing went into the AI industry just recently. Six months. Well, that's created a ton of jobs. That's created a ton of jobs. It's created, obviously, enormous amount of demand for compute, which I'm happy about, which is also creating a lot of demand for data centers. And we ought to talk about that. I was talking to Governor Abbott of Texas, and he wants to appeal to the industry to make sure that we are empathetic to the small communities as we're building data centers all across America, just to be better listeners.

32:50Jason Calacanis:Let's actually talk about that for a second. What's incredible about NVIDIA, if you break down the component parts, is you've effectively had to become the bank of AI to get the ecosystem going. And you've had to do it at all the levels. You just did this thing with Cloverleaf where you're doing Land PowerShell. You did this great thing with BlackRock and Goldman and all these folks to essentially create the financing capability. Walk us through your capital allocation strategy. What has to happen to get a broader ecosystem of folks to be able to come in and underwrite this next phase?

33:25Jensen Huang:Well, we're creating, as you guys know, this is a new industrial revolution. And every aspect of it is true. This new industry requires manufacturing. Just as the electricity, internet, and now AI. We power anything. We can find anything. Now with AI, we can ask and know anything. Isn't that right? And so that's our future. We tap into the ether, and we can ask it of anything we want, and it could explain it to us. Now, in order for that to happen, it's got to produce the intelligence. And so that's a production process, which is the reason why this infrastructure has to get built. But once you get the infrastructure built, the question is, what about all of the other layers across the United States?

34:10Jensen Huang:This industry isn't just about the model. It's not just about the chips. It's mostly about the applications on top. It's mostly about the infrastructure layer, the data centers, and all the infrastructure, the construction, the electricity, the power generation. All of that is involved. And so I look across the entire ecosystem and look for bottlenecks. And if there are places where extraordinary companies are being built. Constraints. constraints, extraordinary companies being built. Maybe it's a supply chain that has to get scaled up so that when we're ready to deploy compute, that they'll be ready for us, land power shell.

34:52Jensen Huang:And so this is no different than looking at the supply chain upstream. You know, I probably think about the long-term supply chain more than most because our company is really large. And in order for us to succeed, a whole bunch of companies has to support me. You know, it's got a Corning has this, you know, Wendell Corning has to support me, Lumentum and, you know, TSMC, of course, and memory companies. And so we started working with all of these companies long before the revolution, the growth came so that the growth could happen. Now I'm doing a downstream.

35:26Jason Calacanis:The compute cycle tends to be that the earnings over time, over long stretches of time, tends to move up the stack, right, towards the application layer where you can over-earn for larger periods of time. I mean, you bought Hugging Face. Now you're sort of actively in the serving business. I mean, it seems pretty natural that products like Open Router make a lot of sense. It seems pretty obvious that there are better versions of ways to build things like Bedrock. I'm sure you think about it. What's the natural conclusion? Because it seems like the folks up here have no issue trying to move down.

36:01Jason Calacanis:And you have the best balance sheet, these incredible engineers, and you have the proven experience to make it right and engineer the product and get it out. So how do you think about looking up and saying, I could probably do that?

36:14Jensen Huang:The reason why NVIDIA runs every single model in the world, it's incredible. Last year, about a year and a half ago, the only thing we ran was OpenAI. Yeah. And now look at amazing models are available. The Metamuse is available. You got Grok is available. GrokBot's incredible. We now run Gemini. And Anthropic is scaling up on our platform as well. Since a year and a half ago, you got all these Frontier AI models that are now open, that are available. So the number of models that are growing, there's a whole bunch of companies that I won't mention that are building Frontier models as well. And the number of AI labs are growing.

36:54Jensen Huang:The ineffables, the reflections, the list goes on. The physical intelligence, the list goes on. And so all of these labs are building on NVIDIA. And the reason for that is because as a company, I'd rather for us to help everybody succeed instead of taking a slice out. and so we would go up as far as we need to but as low as possible our strategy is go up as far as we need to and as low as possible and the reason for that is because if i do that if i solved if not for nvidia creating q dnn all of the frameworks wouldn't exist if not for us creating megatron megatron core then all of the large-scale training wouldn't have been wouldn't exist so we we go and we invent all the technology necessary as far as we need to, and then we let a thousand flowers bloom.

37:49Jensen Huang:And so that posture allows us to be, quite frankly, the only...

37:54Jason Calacanis:Well, look, let's be honest. I agree with you. The pushback would be that it really would be great to have more competition at the hyperscale layer. And I think you've done a great job supporting the neoclouds. There's some, and by the way, I think you introduced me to Nebius. Superb. Great. Everything, they're amazing. But we need like 50 of these guys. We need 100 of them. We need 1 ,000 of them. And it just may take some. Yeah.

38:18Jensen Huang:You know, Shemad, it's just I'm surprisingly uncompetitive. Really? Yeah. That's not my thing. You know, my thing is kind of like, for example, I'd be more than happy with five hyperscalers. However, the reason I noticed the early customers of all the neoclouds, all the what we call NCPs, all the early customers were the hyperscalers. Exactly. And the reason for that is because the hyperscalers plan once a year, but the market dynamics is so volatile right now that they're always almost wrong. And so with all these regional clouds who are agile and they can move fast, they know their state or they know their country, they know their region, they're securing land, power, and shell in a way that's hard for somebody who sits in Seattle or sits in Palo Alto to be able to see the planet.

39:10Jensen Huang:And so we now have basically a large scale distributed network of companies that are building, securing land power shell for us. And now countries realize it's strategic. So many countries are saying, I'm going to take my power and only give it to my own companies. Well, NVIDIA is in that country as well. And we could whether it's firm us in Australia, we just did a whole bunch of stuff in Australia, brought on two more gigabytes, Southeast Asia, of course, IOH and others bring on a few gigabytes. And so we're building gigawatts. So we're building, you know, we're scaling up. It's pretty clear though, I just wanna get this one thing in.

39:53It's pretty clear that you're going pretty high up and getting very focused on open source. Obviously you have your Nemo Tron's doing exceptionally well. I use them often, hugging face, poolside and Laguna, very, very solid product that you're now acquihiring, hiring, whatever it is. And then you have your open source stack for self-driving, also very disruptive. So we are the frontier model in five domains. Yeah. And so you don't seem to build products to get the silver medal. You seem to go for the gold. So are you going for the gold and will you have the best hands down open source model? and then part B to that is, can open source catch up to frontier models and are you the person to do it?

40:39Jensen Huang:So the logic, Jason, is that we will build it because one, we can, we have the skills to do it, and because our customers need us to do it. Right. So for example, Alpamayo is the world's first thinking self-driving car. And by thinking, by reasoning, you don't need as much data as, you know, you don't have to train on a few billion hours of road data. Because you can reason about it. Break down the problem into, oh, I've seen this before. It's not exactly the same, but it's largely the same as that. Okay? And so Alpamayo, why is it necessary? Well, there's a whole bunch of car companies. Every car in the world is going to be autonomous.

41:19But beyond that, every ag tech, every truck, every van,

41:25Jensen Huang:and most of them aren't big enough in scale to be able to build that whole stack. So I'll build an extraordinary stack for them. They do last mile adapting for their application. Now everything that moves in the future could be autonomous. If not for us building some of the biology models, the world wouldn't have it. The ESM2 protein found language model, we created that. ESM Fold, Open Fold, Alpha Fold 2, all the stuff with QEquivariant, all of that stuff, technology, wouldn't have existed if we didn't build it. One of my favorites, Proteina Complexa, is synthesizing next generation proteins and it's binding.

42:04Jensen Huang:It's groundbreaking stuff. We built that. And so we'll build that because Lily needs it and Merck needs it and others need it and they don't have the capability to do it or they're not yet there. And so we can make a real contribution. So I do everything out of need. I'm not trying to disrupt. I mean, we don't wake up in the morning, try to disrupt anybody. We just wake up in the morning, try to help everybody. Jensen, what about competitive threats that might be emerging to your core business? Can you just comment? We're just so nice. Yes. Well, I know this is, well, I actually want to just get your, let's just call it a take.

42:37What's your take on TerraFab, 100 million square foot facility Elon's announced? And -

42:43Jensen Huang:If anybody could do it, he can. and the two of us were on a flight together to a country. With a person who sometimes calls you on the phone. It was a nice plane. And we had like, you know, Elon likes to talk about these things and so we spent a lot of time talking about it. Anybody could do it, he could do it. Because you design chips, you don't fab them. could your chips be fab there or is it well we know we we know a lot about process technology because we're pushing the limits of everything right and you know because we scale at such large scale uh we have incredible memory technology inside the company we're the world's best 30s company you know we got lots of amazing so your take is you've talked a lot about it so we could just yeah we could talk about it and and um you can't discourage elon from doing it which is one of his incredible that's his superpower and once he decides to go do something it's hard to stop them.

43:43Jensen Huang:And so I... Can you give us your take on where China is with advanced lithography systems, native grown? They're going to get there by 2030. By 2030. Yeah. And 2030 is just around the corner. Yeah. Also, that's... Sorry, how long will all be dead at that time, so... And for China, does that mean the switch is flipped and then that's all going to go into mainland fabs almost immediately? You know, the way to think about China is we're really good at high volume production. and this is just a matter of time. And I think in decades as well, I've been around a long time, and for NVIDIA, I've got to think about what happens next decade and decade after that.

44:27Jensen Huang:So two or three years, it's just a click. It's nothing. And so as far as they're concerned, they're already there.

44:33Jason Calacanis:They're already there. Yeah. Jensen, Elon, and Gwen.

44:37Jensen Huang:We've got to run. America, we've got to run. Speed run. We got it. Speed run. Slowing down is definitely the wrong strategy. But, I mean, it feels apparent, I think, to most of us in the industry that we're kind of in the AGI moment. And it's a definition, obviously, as smart as any other human. I think we're already there. We're there, right? And so then super intelligence is the next waypoint based on what you see, based on your customer base, based on your history. And Jason, I think we're there, too. You think we're at super intelligence? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. When you take a narrow segment, I mean, my self-driving car, I don't want you to make me an omelet.

45:15Jensen Huang:I just want you to drive the car. That is super intelligent. Super intelligent. And it's better than a human. Yeah, yeah. Like one-tenth the accident rate. Exactly. Synthesizing proteins, doing virtual screening of proteins. We're already there. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Are you having fun being on the frontier of humanity? I like it yeah ladies and gentlemen I like it I like it and guys it's great there the future is great and we want to get there listen a lot of us don't have to work but I got to tell you it's too good not to be so fun I want to be there I want all of you guys there with me We're all going to be there.

46:04Jensen Huang:We're going to be enormously successful together as a humanity. And in the meantime, we've got to encourage them, urge them on. They're doing really, really important work, as you guys know. And I want them to succeed. I also would love for us to tone down the drama. And most importantly, we need all of America to come with us. That's how we make it.

46:27Jason Calacanis:Ladies and gentlemen, Jensen Wong. Thanks, man. I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you. That was awesome. Pulling your party. Thanks guys.