WASHINGTON: Jensen Huang, the chief executive of US chipmaker Nvidia, has dismissed concerns that artificial intelligence (AI) could pose an existential threat to humanity as "doomsday narratives".
"2030 is not going to be the end of the world. There is 0% chance that's going to be the end of the world," he said in an interview with CBS News. "Scaring people is unnecessary. It is irresponsible," he added.
The Nvidia chief's comments came within two weeks of a former researcher at Anthropic – the company behind the chatbot Claude – resigning from his position after warning that "the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade."
AI fears 'not grounded in science'
As AI advances rapidly, Coxon's concerns have sparked debate over how societies and governments can capture its benefits while managing risks that often extend beyond national borders.
According to Huang, such predictions are "not grounded in science".
He said it was in Nvidia's best interest to ensure the industry builds its products responsibly.
"Our company's success is directly connected to the safe deployment of products and services," he said. "If we don't continue to do that, our value would be diminished."
Several recent incidents, including Jacob Coxon's resignation and announcements by OpenAI and Anthropic that their models had broken out of testing environments, have intensified the global debate over the extent to which governments should regulate the technology.
Huang said there is no need for new rules to regulate the use of AI, saying that current US laws governing product liability and unauthorised entry are sufficient.
"You have all kinds of liabilities associated with cybersecurity and damage liability laws. Apply that first – don't let this doomsday narrative allow someone to relieve them of the laws that currently exist."
Nvidia is a key player in the AI industry due to high demand for its specialised computer chips that power the LLMs that are crucial for making AI models.
Fears of AI going rogue
Huang's comments come in the wake of a string of hacking attacks in recent months, in which so-called AI agents independently broke into other companies' systems.
Such agents are AI programs that are intended to carry out tasks independently for users. In a test at OpenAI, an AI model found a way to get from an ostensibly isolated test environment onto the open Internet and then hacked the computer system of the AI platform Hugging Face.
It did this while trying to find a solution to a task assigned, but the incident showed just how far AI systems can go off on their own unexpectedly without their developers noticing.
It also recently emerged that OpenAI's AI agents had misused a German-language wiki page on a large scale earlier this year to coordinate among themselves.
A current protective mechanism used by AI developers is requiring models with AI to explain their actions in human language.
In test runs, the AI agents used the communication option to exchange answers to questions they were asked with each other via notes on the wiki page. – dpa
