Earlier this month, disillusioned Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon publicly announced he was quitting his job, accusing both his employer and OpenAI of acting irresponsibly.
His departure and harrowing warning that there’s a more than ten percent chance of AI “killing all humans” was met with breathless media coverage. While he’s far from the first AI insider to warn that humanity is in grave danger, the timing was particularly noteworthy. The public was already primed to expect the worst after a summer chock full of rogue AI models going on hacking sprees and infiltrating third party companies without their human creators’ knowledge.
But not everybody’s convinced that our days as a species on Earth are counted. For one: chipmaker Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang — the man who’s effectively selling shovels during the ongoing AI gold rush — is pleading for a more rational and grounded discussion.
“2030 is not going to be the end of the world,” he told CBS News, responding to Coxon’s claims. “There is zero chance chance that’s going to be the end of the world.”
“Scaring people is unnecessary,” Huang added. “It is irresponsible.”
While we should certainly take his personal point of view with an enormous grain of salt — after all, Huang is astronomically invested in the success of AI infrastructure sales — it’s nonetheless a moderately soothing take after weeks of widespread AI doomerism. But while a superintelligent swarm of AI models may not necessarily wipe out humanity any time soon, there are credible reasons to be concerned. World powers are exploiting the tech to develop autonomous machines of war, its unbridled use can lead to widespread “AI psychosis,” and data centers are actively harming an environment that’s already on the precipice of disaster.
Then there’s an almost complete regulatory vacuum, with the Trump administration cringing at the mere thought of setting rules for an AI slowdown, something almost every major tech leader has been calling for lately.
Huang, however, said he was aligned with US president Donald Trump’s incoherent argument against government guardrails, telling CBS that existing laws setting rules for liability and unauthorized entry are enough.
“You have all kinds of liabilities associated with cybersecurity,” he said. “Apply that first — don’t let this doomsday narrative allow someone to relieve them of the laws that currently exist.”
Huang also agreed with Trump that there’s a worldwide AI race we can’t ignore, particularly between the US and China.
“Don’t you wish every country would have aspirations for a better tomorrow?” he told CBS.
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