Zvi Mowshowitz评黄仁勋播客：拒信ASI，误呼关停OpenAI

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 never ship an unsafe product or one you hadn’t properly tested, that’s crazy talk, and if the labs can’t test their products safely then the labs must be shut down.

And of course you would never let a ‘race’ or similar incentives get to you, because it is the responsibility of the company and CEO to not ship or do anything unsafe.

Jensen Huang does not believe in AI existential risk, or in superintelligence, and he kind of doesn’t believe in AI at all, but he sure as hell believes in precision and engineering and quality control and safety and standing by your products. His tolerance for safety risks is lower than even the most paranoid safety advocate. Imagine if he understood what the top risks actually were.

This matters quite a lot, as Jensen Huang is CEO of Nvidia, makes decisions on chip allocations and investments, and also heavily influences both President Donald Trump and American AI policy, with a rather forceful lobbying arm. Here you can see him and his wife (!) last night at the head table at the state dinner with Donald Trump, Melania Trump Xi, Peng, Musk and Cook.

There are at least three truly killer quotes here, to that end.

Table of Contents

• Jensen Gives His AI Speech.
• They Took Our Jobs.
• Open Weights Models Are Good For Nvidia.
• The HuggingFace Incident.
• Jensen Huang Says Keep Your AIs From Harming the World.
• Jensen Huang Accidentally Calls For Shutting Down OpenAI.
• Jensen’s Arguments Prove Too Much.
• Astra Is Hard To Monitor.
• Jensen Huang Seems Legitimately Confused In Confusing Ways.
• Solve Your Other Problems First and Get Back to Me.
• Explicit Denial of Existential Risk.
• A Short Summary.
• Chip City.
• Jensen Huang.

Jensen Gives His AI Speech

• AI as a five-layer cake. Energy, chips, infrastructure, models, applications.
• Jensen’s vision is a world where we can do anything.
• One might almost say he spent so much time ensuring we could…
• This is not actually a vision of the world. It is a vision of a capability.
• The right question is, if AI has that capability, what actually happens?
• Radiology. Quality up, productivity up, demand up. Parallel to SWEs. Expectation of lots of new jobs.
• It’s a good speech if you are low-info and haven’t heard it many times before.
• “Here’s the proof point. In the last six months, A.I. has become, if you will, useful — the inflection point of A.I. Previous to that, we spent 15 years trying to make it work. All of a sudden, in the last six months, it became useful.”
• AI was highly useful well before March 2026, but yes things did get a lot more useful at the threshold of Opus 4.5 and Claude Code, and the vast majority of AI utility gained so far has been in the last six months. That’s exponentials.
• Jensen does not seem to appreciate that this is not a one-time step change, and that these gains will continue into the future.

They Took Our Jobs

• $500 billion has been invested in AI natives in the last six months, so jobs are obviously being created.
• Not so fast, not in terms of practical implications.
• In absolute terms yes, $500 billion is going to create some jobs.
• That does not mean it is all that many. A lot of AI investments are very stingy in terms of jobs directly created per dollar.
• It also might destroy many more jobs than it creates, both by replacing and competing away existing jobs.
• The anticipation of future AI could also net destroy or prevent jobs.
• On the macro level more investment creates net jobs in other indirect ways if this is not substitution for other investment, and mostly it isn’t, but I don’t think this is what Jensen is trying to take credit for here.
• Jensen claims America lost manufacturing jobs primarily due to outsourcing, rather than due to technology. And that we’re going to bring those jobs back.
• A goose, chasing you, asking how we were able to do the outsourcing.
• As Ezra says, if your job gets outsourced to AI, is that technological job loss? Is it outsourcing? Is it both? It is kind of both.
• Also, Jensen is wrong. Technology and automation dominated here. See Hicks and Devaraj (Ball State, 2015). Opus 5.5 says technology and automation dominate this, and are responsible for 80%+ of job losses in manufacturing in America, whereas Astra is more conservative and guesses 70%.
• He does not explain how we will bring the jobs back, other than citing Nvidia purchase commitments, because we won’t. Production might return, but jobs gone. We can create some new jobs, at least for now, but if we do that it should mostly be because we want the production, not the jobs.
• Manufacturing in 2036, even in non-ASI worlds, is going to be very automated.
• Jensen believes we are going to see jobs change en masse and there’s going to be a net creation of jobs, industries that do not exist today, because of human ambition. We will always want more.
• To the extent he is in good faith this sounds like a pure AI pilling failure. Jensen thinks accomplishing things will still centrally require humans.
• Jensen says people’s ambitions are “to make their children’s lives better, to take care of their family, take care of their parents. Ambition to be rich, to be able to travel. These are all ambitions.”
• Yes, but those ambitions are about consumption, not production.
• Jensen considers it his problem to do his job, as in make the chips, and “channel all of our worries into helping people be inspired by this technology and use it.”
• This is straight up living in denial. He doesn’t even treat the risks as someone else’s problem. He says society’s share is ‘what they get to enjoy is my optimism.’
• Meanwhile he is actively trying to interfere with others who attempt to solve the problems.
• Americans believe AI will net destroy jobs. Jensen responds that AI makes it easier to code and to do things and it’s incredible. Why be anxious when you can be excited? Use the tech so that you, personally, benefit.
• That’s straight up not an answer. It’s a non sequitur.
• Job openings for senior software engineers (SWEs) are up but for juniors they are down. Ezra asks, do you need those junior engineers? Jensen says “Oh, good one. Wait two years. Because it takes four years to go to college. The mean time to graduation of this new technology is two years away.