Jensen Huang, CEO of the company Nvidia, which manufactures the most powerful chips for AI centers, was on stage at an event organized by the tech podcast All In when an assistant brought him his phone. The call was from the President of the United States, Donald Trump. “President,” Huang said, “I am sitting in front of a few thousand people. And we were talking about you.” The conversation continued privately for a few seconds until Trump agreed to be put on live.
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Trump referred to the warnings about AI with a forceful “this is all a hoax.” “Data centers are great. They make people rich. They make states rich. And they are the oil of the next 20 or 25 years. AI is more important than the internet, much more. They are just playing the game for a lot of people who don’t want that to happen. They could be politicians. It could also be China. And we are not going to let that happen. It’s a hoax,” he stated.
The U.S. president applied a particular genetic theory to his knowledge on the subject: “Robots are not going to conquer the world. That’s not going to happen. My uncle was at the top, probably the best of all time, frankly. He was a professor at MIT for 41 or 42 years, and he was known for being one of the brightest men. He was at the top of many things. Jensen knows all about it, but he did many things. So I have a bit of that genetically. A bit of genetic strength, if you believe in the racial issue. But I do believe in it. I have that genetic strength.” “That explains why you know so much about AI,” Jensen Huang replied.
“I also have common sense about AI,” Trump added. He was convinced that “robots are not going to take over. AI is not going to dominate the rest of the world. That’s all a hoax. That said, we have to be careful. We have to do things and we have to do them prudently. But that doesn’t mean we are going to limit ourselves to the industry, because over the next ten years we will work on how to build it.”
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I have a phrase, Trump continued: “‘Whoever wins in AI, wins.’ That’s how important it is. It’s more important than the Internet. And whoever wins in AI, wins. And we can’t allow these kinds of things to happen. That includes data centers. There are communities that were dying that now have data centers and are now really prosperous communities.” “
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“We are going to make sure that everyone wins in the AI race in the United States. Every sector, every company, every state, every person,” he said.
Trump ended his speech with a plea about his administration: “The country has never been better. We have 20 trillion dollars of investment coming into the country, compared to much less than a trillion under Sleepy Joe Biden’s administration.”
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