Santa Clara: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has firmly rejected fears that AI could trigger an extinction-level event, saying there is 'zero per cent' chance it will bring about the end of the world by 2030.
Speaking to CBS News' 'Sunday Morning', Huang also backed calls for rapid AI development, while stressing that companies should not release products before they are ready or safe.
Huang said he completely disagreed with claims that AI would destroy the world by 2030. "I completely disagree that AI is going to destroy, is going to be the end of the world um in 2030… I believe the claims of the end of the world stirring fear across America and the people who are doing it makes no sense to me. So they must be doing it for ulterior reasons. Maybe it's political, maybe it's otherwise, maybe it's just attention grabbing, maybe so that they could get a great interview with you. I don't know what is the reason for it, but however it's characterized 2030 is not going to be the end of the world. There is zero per cent chance that's going to be the end of the world," he told CBS' senior business and technology correspondent Jo Ling Kent in the interview.
Huang believes the AI industry needs to push ahead with development while keeping the safety of its products in mind.
"We should go as fast as we can irrespective of anybody else… We're going to go as fast as we can, but we would never ever, and never should, ship products before they're ready, deliver products that are unsafe… And nobody's expecting us to do that. But everybody's expecting us to succeed and help America be as prosperous as possible," he told CBS News.
The debate over the risks of AI has intensified in recent weeks, with some industry figures calling for safeguards or a slower pace of development. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has described the rapid development of AI as a "warning sign" and argued that the industry needs to slow down.
Amodei has also highlighted the possibility of "recursive self-improvement", in which AI systems increasingly contribute to the development of subsequent AI systems. Anthropic says such a development is not yet fully realised or inevitable, but could increase the risk of humans losing control over AI systems.
"We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models… My first concern is that, since roughly this summer, AI has been advancing drastically faster, driven primarily by AI's growing ability to build the next generation of AI. This dynamic is called recursive self-improvement, and it is starting to happen across the industry, including at Anthropic, as we and others have described. Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all," Dario wrote in an essay on September 12.
The Anthropic CEO's concerns came after Jacob Coxon, a researcher associated with the company, publicly announced he was leaving the industry, citing concerns about AI companies "racing to build systems they won't be able to control".
Amodei's concerns have also contributed to a wider debate among leaders of major AI companies over the pace of development and the safeguards needed as AI capabilities advance.