The tradition of tech CEOs bending the knee to Donald Trump continues, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang both taking turns with the shameless flattery.
Per MS Now, Trump “met privately… backstage” with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at the Republican midterm convention, at Altman’s request, last Thursday. MS Now’s only other insight into the conversation was that it concerned the growing power of AI—not exactly a shocker—and that it preceded Altman’s endorsement of a blog post this last weekend from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calling for a controlled slowdown of AI development.
On Monday, Trump sent out a post accusing Amodei of “pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel,’” imagining a “SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers,” and rejecting calls for any kind of pause.
“WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!” Trump added.
Also on Monday, The Verge reported, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took a call from Trump on stage at the All-In Podcast’s All-In Summit. Trump used the opportunity to call concerns of AI apocalypse a “hoax” and assured audience members “the robots will not be taking over.”
In posts on Truth Social on Monday, Trump (calling himself the “Hoax Buster”) mocked AI critics as believing AI will literally “destroy the World, and that Robots will be marching into our Cities, and getting rid of us all!” He later attributed this viewpoint to the “Radical Left Dumocrats.”
Trump regularly contradicts himself and his posts, and his administration’s policies on AI and cybersecurity are labyrinthine crystal mirror-mazes of grievances and contradictions that he primarily navigates by throwing a rock and seeing what shatters. So, make of his posts what you will.
As The Conversation noted, there are several reasons to be skeptical of the AI firms’ motivations here. A pause could be a strategic industry proposal to make the most stringent proposals, such as the Sen. Bernie Sanders-led Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, seem unnecessary. Safety standards or export controls, whether via Congress or executive fiat, could raise expenses for smaller or foreign competitors.
Anthropic’s recent claims to a second straight quarter of profitability depend on “adjusted operating income,” which specifically excludes training costs, which is generally the top expenditure for AI firms. (xAI, for example, spent several times its revenue on training and infrastructure costs last year.)
Altman, who has also endorsed the pause, delayed OpenAI’s planned IPO over supposed safety risks—although The New Stack noted that a “plausible alternative incentive” (i.e., ulterior motive) is that OpenAI is “hemorrhaging cash in an extremely resource-intensive business” and looking to cut costs.
Huang, whose firm’s path to adding more trillions to its market cap relies on shipping high volumes of AI GPUs, is no doubt laughing all the way to the bank.
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