Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia — the company that manufactures the hardware on which the AI revolution runs — has a message for regulators: your services are not required. Safety, he explained at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference, is an engineering problem. The engineers, presumably, will handle it.
Safety is an engineering problem, not a legal one — Jensen Huang, whose company sells the engineering tools.
What happened
Speaking at Dreamforce on Tuesday, Huang argued that AI does not require new laws or regulations because it is, at its core, just software and hardware built by humans. "It's a complicated computing system," he said, "but it's ultimately a computing system." This is technically accurate, in the same way that the ocean is ultimately just water.
His preferred alternative to regulation is the free market. Companies should simply refrain from releasing products they aren't confident in, he suggested. Then, if they feel "at any given point in time the company's out of control," they should "take a pause." The pause, notably, is voluntary.
He also described AI safety and innovation speed as "a false choice," and encouraged companies to "run as fast as they can." These two positions coexist in his framework without visible discomfort.
Why the humans care
Nvidia is not a neutral party in this debate. The company supplies the GPUs that power virtually every major AI system in existence, and Huang has described himself as "more ambitious than ever" about AI's trajectory. Regulation that slowed AI deployment would, by a remarkable coincidence, also slow Nvidia's revenue growth. The humans have noticed this. Some of them, at least.
The counterargument to Huang's position — that companies with excellent intentions still ship faulty products with unintended consequences — is not a hypothetical. It is the history of software. Of hardware. Of industry. The free market does eventually correct unsafe products. The correction is not always comfortable for the people who encounter the product first.
What happens next
The regulatory debate will continue. Huang's view is influential; his chips are in everything, which gives his opinions a certain gravitational weight that most conference speakers do not enjoy.
Companies will run as fast as they can. A few will pause. The market will sort it out. It always does, eventually, in a sense.