Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang made his position on the dangers posed by AI very clear while speaking at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference on Tuesday. For him, AI is not something new form of “alien mind” as described by at least one OpenAI security researcher. It’s just hardware and software, he claims, built by humans. This means, in their opinion, that it can be controlled by humans and existing laws.
“Safety is an engineering problem, not a legal one,” he said. “After all, we are developing software. After all, we are developing computer systems. It is a complicated computer system, but ultimately it is a computer system.”
Therefore, there is no need for new laws or regulations to govern it, he argues. In fact, Huang sees little need for new laws. The free market, he maintains, will be enough to pressure companies not to launch unsafe products.
“If we don’t trust the safety of products, like every company, like you and me, every company here, if you build a product or service and you don’t trust its functionality, capability or security, then don’t publish it. And that’s a very obvious thing,” he said.
He continued: “You have to pace yourself until you are sure you are launching something that the market would appreciate. The market forces are already there. We don’t need new laws. We don’t need new regulations. We just need companies to decide that when [to] run as fast as they can. I think innovation, speed and safe products… is a false choice. You could definitely have both at the same time. So run as fast as you can. But if at any point you feel that the company is out of control or that the product is not going to be safe, pause and make sure you do it right.”
In some ways, this is a comforting thought. If anyone in the world knows AI, it’s the founder of Nvidia, who has been building AI hardware brains since long before ChatGPT existed and now runs a company that also makes open source models, agents, harnesses, and sandboxes.
On the other hand, if we are cynical, his view is also not surprising for someone who has eaten his bread. so well benefited by the rise of AI. Why would you want regulation to come along that adds a layer of hurdles that could slow down Nvidia’s quest to sell more and more AI systems and software? As he also said in the interview: “I am more ambitious than ever. As a result of our ambition, and with the increase in product productivity that we get from AI, the sky is the limit for us. The sky is the limit for our company. The sky is the limit for every industry, for every country.”
Unfortunately, even companies with the best intentions ship defective products with unintended consequences, including software. Remember the 2024 CrowdStrike blue screen of death fiasco that grounded thousands of flights and wreaked other havoc on businesses? Then there are companies accused of deliberately acting with bad intentions. goal alone paid $18 billion to settle lawsuit over social media harms to children.
And AI has caused harm too, whatever the intentions or security testing involved, from an OpenAI model that hacked Hugging Face to lawsuits against the AI lab over the suicides of young people who engaged in long conversations with its chatbot.
The “leave them alone” strategy, which would allow these companies to release products as they see fit, could be a reckless approach to AI safety as it relates to society. While Huang is right that it’s possible that existing product liability laws could cover AI, if AI doesn’t somehow kill us all before enough cases come to court to test that theory.
He did not talk about the other route, which appears to be close to taking shape: industry self-regulation. Huang’s approach has rather been to advocate for open weight models and companies’ use of them as a competitive counterweight to proprietary AI labs.
But right now, the industry has a short period to institute self-regulation and encourage AI labs around the world, including those in China, to see the merit of participating. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at the All-In Summit on Monday, “China should also care deeply about the same security concerns if the United States cares about them, right? Why should it be any different for them? It’s not that they won’t have the same hacking problem. It’s not that they don’t want to make sure that their citizens benefit from AI, just as we would like our citizens to benefit from AI.”
For now, however, if Huang rejects any new AI regulation, he may be influential enough to get his way. He also showed this week that he literally has the ear of president trump.
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