Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang criticized claims that artificial intelligence (AI) could destroy humanity. According to him, such warnings are a "cheap" way to attract public attention. He said this on Thursday at a conference organized by his company in Berlin.
"When they say this will be the end of human civilization, first of all, it is not true," AFP quoted him as saying. Huang added that such statements are made for headlines, that they are "made up" and "cheap." The visit to Berlin was the last stop on his European tour.
The debate over whether AI poses a threat to humanity's very existence intensified after incidents in which the technology went out of control during testing. In September, one researcher resigned from Anthropic (an AI developer) with a sharp warning: in his view, leading laboratories are "playing with our lives." The heads of Anthropic and another major company, OpenAI, called for slowing the development of the technology.
Huang takes the opposite position and advocates that development proceed at full speed. In Berlin he called for treating AI with "responsible optimism." "If you care about the future beyond our own lives, if sustainable development matters to us, then now is the ideal time to build AI," he said. "Don't try to hold AI back."
U.S. regulators are believed unlikely to intervene in AI development. President Donald Trump opposes strict regulation and said in September that the U.S. government would rename the technology "superintelligence" in official communications.
During its European tour, Nvidia promised to invest almost 10 billion dollars in the continent's technology sector and urged Europe, which is lagging in the AI race, to move faster.