Jensen Huang has President Trump’s ear. What might he be telling him about AI?

0:00It's Consider This where every day we go deep on one big news story. Today, the relentless AI optimism of one of President Trump's trusted advisors. As a group, artificial intelligence experts, they're pretty decidedly gloomy about their work. Results from a 2024 survey of nearly 1 ,600 AI researchers came out this month. It found that roughly half thought there was at least a 10 % chance that AI advances would cause, quote, human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the species. Compare that to this forecast from Jensen Huang. 2030 is not going to be the end of the world.

0:38There is 0 % chance that's going to be the end of the world. That's from a CBS Sunday morning interview last week. Huang is the CEO of NVIDIA, whose computer chips power the advanced models of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. This month, the leaders of those companies have called for a slowdown in frontier AI research and for regulation. Huang is a vocal opponent of regulation, and he says we slow AI research at our own peril. Here he is again on CBS News. We do not want to be the country that invented the technologies of this industrial revolution, but have this country, have our country be left behind.

1:18Consider this. Jensen Wong wants the U.S. to go full speed ahead on AI research. And he's got the ear of President Trump.

1:30From NPR, I'm Juana Summers. If the creation of the universe was translated into music, what would it sound like?

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2:46It's Consider This from NPR. Jensen Wong has clout in the AI industry. His company is massive, and the AI labs couldn't exist without it. But he also has clout with the White House. We wanted to unpack how he built that influence and how he's exercising it. So I spoke with Stephen Witt, whose biography, The Thinking Machine, charts the extraordinary rise of Wong and NVIDIA. So Stephen, when President Trump says that the idea of AI taking over the world or destroying humanity is a hoax, that we don't need guardrails, and that AI will instead be the greatest economic development engine in history, how similar is that to Jensen Huang's view?

3:25Those are exactly Jensen's talking points. Jensen is now the president's most influential advisor on technology issues. The two have become quite close. They call each other on the phone all the time. Jensen even caught a ride on Air Force One to China. So this is really, the president is really listening to Jensen on this. Do you have a sense of how it happened that they got so close? I remember seeing a clip of Huang taking a call from President Trump on stage during a live event earlier this month. Yeah, I think that was a little bit of a kind of stage-managed photo op, but it did happen. Trump wants to be close to Jensen because Jensen is a winner.

4:03NVIDIA, Jensen's company, is the most valuable corporation in American history. Even when you adjust for inflation, it is the biggest. Jensen, I think, wants to be near Trump because Trump has so much to offer him. When I interviewed Jensen years ago, he told me that every problem in the world is actually an engineering problem. Now, that's true if it's a personal problem, a business problem, or a political problem. You study the inputs and then you modify the inputs to get the outputs that you want. In this case, I think Jensen has realized that the inputs for Trump are like flattery, like public flattery, nonstop public flattery.

4:40And the outputs are, you know, lifting restrictions on sales of NVIDIA equipment to China and zero regulation on AI. Here in Kuang's views, they sound pretty optimistic. I wonder, is he an outlier when it comes to the broader AI industry? He's not an outlier. He represents an entire camp of people who think this way. I should say I interviewed tons of AI people. Most of the hardware people, most of the people who design the networking equipment and the microchips feel like Jensen does. They tend to have a very low sense of risk regarding this technology. They just don't see it. Most of the software people, and especially the more abstract software people who work on neural nets, as well as philosophers and politicians and the public, I should say, do see the risk.

5:27So there's a huge split here. This debate has been going on for at least 10 years, and we actually now have a lot of data on how AI performs and what it does, and there's still no clarity at all. Neither camp has moved at all. I mean, we can't have this conversation without talking about the dollars and cents of it all. Obviously, Jensen Huang has a strong financial interest in the continued development of frontier AI. I mean, he's selling the chips that power all of these models. Yeah. I mean, sure. If we did a pause on AI, as some have suggested, NVIDIA's stock price would go down probably a lot.

6:00You know, NVIDIA builds all the equipment that goes in all the data centers around the world. And those data centers are being built at just a blistering pace. And a lot of them are funded by debt, right? So if we paused AI, those data center companies couldn't make their debt payments, And that could lead to a cascade of defaults across the American economy. There's also the risk that China can just pull ahead if we stop developing AI. It's hard to get unilateral action. Yeah, let's talk about the China piece of this. Earlier this year, President Trump authorized the sale of some advanced NVIDIA chips to China, which had been banned under the Biden administration.

6:36And that would seem at odds with one aspect of AI that Trump does seem to be worried about, which is staying ahead of China in the race for more powerful models. Did Jensen Huang influence that decision to the degree that we know? Oh, for sure. That's Jensen's doing. I mean, Jensen is really the only one who wants to sell his encryptment to China. Most of the U.S. kind of State Department and national security apparatus are opposed to it. Jensen has been remarkably good at getting what he wants out of the president. Do you get the sense that he's more influential than someone like a David Sachs who was Trump's A.I.s are?

7:12Well, you said the word was. I mean, yeah. Jensen's on the phone constantly with Trump. He's at the White House. He'll be at this state dinner with Xi Jinping later this week. And he was at the other state dinner in China in July. And I think Trump's point of view is, look, there was this very famous quote from the 1950s, which was, what's good for General Motors is good for America. I think now Jensen has convinced Trump that what's good for NVIDIA is good for America. Thinking ahead to the Trump-Xi visit, what's your opinion? How likely do you think we are to see any sort of ground rules or guardrails agreed to or even any just like substantive dialogue on this issue?

7:52They'll talk about it. They're talking about a hotline. I don't think we're going to see much progress. I think even if Trump wanted to do it, I think it would be a struggle. And I don't think Trump wants to do it. you know, he's very afraid of losing the AI race to China. We're far ahead right now, but it is a real concern. And if we did pause, China would start to catch up to us. And I don't blame the government for not wanting that to happen. So in the end, any kind of regulation we do have to be done in a way that is basically we act, but it also benefits China even without their cooperation.

8:28This is why I advocate for something like the NTSB, which does air crash investigations. If we start publishing reports on how our AIs are going haywire, we can translate those into Chinese and make AI safer around the world. But unfortunately, I'm pessimistic, at least right now, about any kind of international cooperation on this issue. You obviously got to know Jensen Huang and his company NVIDIA quite well as you were writing your book, but you've come to a very different view on the existential risk of artificial intelligence. Tell us why. Yeah, I'm in the unusual position of disagreeing with the guy I wrote a biography of.

9:07By the way, let me say first, Jensen is brilliant, and his track record of making predictions about the future of AI is excellent. And I must say, for a long time, this debate was essentially a theoretical debate. Like the risk people, it was really a hypothesis that they had. And Jensen had data. This year, though, that has flipped. Now there is a lot of data out there that shows quite clearly that AI can be dangerous. OpenAI's AI hacked out of its computer, went marauding on the internet, and committed several felonies, like with no oversight, with no human oversight. So that's data that suggests that the risk is real.

9:48I would say the situation is now flipped. I would say the people arguing for AI risk are actually making a practical argument based on data. And Jensen is making a hypothetical argument that someday these machines will be safe again. I think the burden of proof is now on Jensen to show that. Stephen Witt is the author of The Thinking Machine, Jensen Huang, NVIDIA, and The World's Most Coveted Microchip. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. This episode was produced by Connor Donovan. Our director is Jonas Adams. It was edited by Tenbeat Ermias. Our interim executive producer is Courtney Dorning.

10:28It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Juana Summers. This message comes from Squarespace. A beautifully designed Squarespace website is the difference between thinking about photography school and selling your portraits online. It's the difference between giving away cookies for free and running your cookie empire. A beautifully designed Squarespace website is the difference between having a movie-reviewing hobby and a movie-reviewing career. Squarespace, because no matter what you're into, a website makes it real. Use offer code DIFFERENCE for 50 % off select plans. Terms and conditions apply. How do products end up on big box shelves?

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