00:00NVIDIA's Jensen Huang has a $5.4 trillion reason to block AI rules.
00:05His company is at the center of the AI gold rush.
00:09It controls about 80% of the market for AI chips,
00:11which sell for as much as $50,000,
00:14and the company boasts margins of 75%.
00:17So what happens if the big AI companies that use those chips,
00:20like Anthropic or OpenAI,
00:22start to slow down the pace of development?
00:24Huang reportedly helped block a proposal
00:27by Alphabet's chief scientist, Demis Hassabis,
00:30for a regulatory body that could set rules
00:32and safety standards around AI.
00:34And in recent days, he's accused AI leaders of having ulterior motives
00:38and not wanting to follow existing rules.
00:41Guess who agrees?
00:42President Trump.
00:43It's a, it's a hoax.
00:45You're right, we're not going to let that happen, sir.
00:48Huang and Trump have become comrades in fighting back
00:51against the safety warnings and calls for rules on AI's progress.
00:55It's possible that they've researched these issues very carefully
00:59and concluded that those warnings are wrong.
01:01More likely is that neither wants to lose all they've gained from the AI boom.
01:06A development slowdown would probably hurt the profits of OpenAI and Anthropic,
01:10which wouldn't be good for the stock market,
01:12which probably wouldn't be good for Trump,
01:14or Nvidia's gargantuan valuation, which would be bad for Huang.
01:18With those kinds of commercial pressures, going more slowly is just not an option.
01:22And that might explain why an effort to set up proper AI safety rules
01:25through the White House this year failed to gain any traction.
01:28The idea reposed by Google's Hassabis was killed
01:31after Nvidia's boss reportedly called Trump and urged him to block it.
01:35Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk called too,
01:38but it's Huang's viewpoint that really matters here
01:40as he's President Trump's new favorite Silicon Valley tech bro.
01:44He's now appeared alongside Trump at least six times during his second term,
01:48and is expected to be at Trump's steak dinner with Xi Jinping this week.
01:53It's hard to know who to trust and what to believe in all the latest discourse
01:57about the economics of AI and the existential risk.
02:01But let's not forget that Nvidia's Jensen Huang not only has a huge commercial incentive
02:05to avoid rules for AI, he's also in a prime position to make or break them.
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