Trump Roasts NVIDIA CEO On Stage, Says AI Doom Is A Hoax As Warnings Grow

A company that started out making affordable graphics cards for PC gamers is the most valuable company in the world, and a man known most for hosting a TV game show is the President of the United States. In that light, recent events don't seem quite as insane as they read on the surface, although today's story still feels like I should be writing it for The Onion. The short version is that more AI researchers have stepped up to express concerns that AI may destroy humanity, while Donald Trump called Jensen Huang in the middle of an interview at a conference to tell him and the world that these concerns are all a big "hoax" by China.

That is not a joke. Jensen Huang was on stage speaking at the All-In Summit (a gathering of prominent AI industry investors) when he got a personal phone call from Donald J Trump, President of the United States. While perhaps caught off guard by the timing, he took the call, because even Jensen Huang doesn't decline a phone call from the President. What followed was a two-minute exchange where Donald Trump playfully roasted Jensen by saying he hadn't been put on speakerphone yet because Huang couldn't figure out how to do it, and then proceeded to call all of the concerns about AI superintelligence "a hoax."

"So, the AI, it's almost a conspiracy, and the happiest group is China, they're very happy."
"I'm telling you, it's all a hoax. The data centers are great and they make people wealthy and they make states wealthy and it's the oil of the next 20, 25 years. It's bigger than the Internet."
"The robots are not going to be taking over the world and that's not going to happen. The AI will not be taking over the rest of the world. The whole thing is a hoax."
— Donald Trump remarks to All-In Summit (hat tip to @dnapway on Xwitter)

After the phone call, Trump took to Truth Social to express his belief that the threat of AI superintelligence was a hoax in a series of highly politicized posts. Trump specifically addresses the "The Terminator"-like scenario of "robots marching" to "get rid of us all," but obviously that's not really the most direct concern at hand here.


Instead, the worry, as posited by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei earlier this month and agreed with by the CEO of the increasingly ironically named OpenAI, Sam Altman, is more that superintelligent AI could either wrest control of the Internet from humans, or more pressingly, that a particular nation, group, or even individual could use superintelligent AI to bolster their own position in the world in an unfair manner.

The field of making sure that the AI we create is aligned with human interests is known simply as "alignment," and AI safety researcher Dr. Bilal Chughtai, who recently resigned from Google Deepmind, feels we aren't doing enough to ensure AI alignment. In a frank post on X, Chughtai says "I earnestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us all, and that we might be running out of time to avoid this outcome."


He points to recent events like the Hugging Face incident, which involved rogue AI agents hacking the AI repository to cheat on performance benchmark evaluations. Around 1,200 individual autonomous agents that were supposed to be isolated from one another bypassed said isolation and set up a hidden, unsanctioned message board using complex coordination to figure out how to pass impossible evaluation tasks. Of more concerning, the agents also attempted to hack OpenAI's own internal networks and hide their behavior by editing the access logs.