On Ezra Klein’s Podcast With Jensen Huang

Jensen Huang accidentally called for shutting down OpenAI and intentionally called for spending vastly more on safety. This is why we say that some podcasts are self-recommending. Here we go. As usual for podcast posts, the baseline bullet points describe key points made, and then the nested statements are my commentary. Some points are dropped. If I am quoting directly I use quote marks, otherwise assume paraphrases. Section titles are from the transcript whenever possible, to aid in navigation, but here we don’t have those so I chose the section titles. Jensen Huang very much does not believe in ASI (superintelligence). He doesn’t think AI can ever be a different kind of thing from software. He thinks demand can rise by a billion times and we can ‘accelerate the living daylights out of’ AI, but it will never be more than a ‘new abstraction level’ and thus won’t fundamentally change anything. This is not a coherent position under reflection, but that is the position he holds. The ‘intro’ sections are fine, but the real meat starts with the HuggingFace Incident. What we see is Jensen Huang on tilt and caught in loops, because either he is doing a bit at a very high level, or on a fundamental level he cannot understand that AI is not like other pieces of software. To him this is a product, like any other product. You make it useful, which happened six months ago, then you flip to spending most of your R&D budget on safety, verifications and evals, and of course you would neve…