“I think the answer is we have to shut the labs down” - Jensen Huang

Before I discuss the latest breaking news, everyone should watch this clip from Jensen’s interview with Ezra Klein (or at least read the transcript below.

Watch Jensen‘s hands, and notice also that he doesn’t know all the facts.

Note the Ezra Klein, ever the attentive and well-prepared listener, picks up on it. The two are implicitly talking about the OpenAI Hugging Face incident, and Jensen doesn’t realize that it was caused by a product that was not, at the time, yet on the market. Ezra gently points that out.

Most importantly, take heed of the solution Jensen recommends.

If a company can’t control its software, we should shut it down.

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Just a couple weeks ago, I argued almost exactly the same thing, focusing on OpenAI, as a test case, in an essay called Pause OpenAI, now.

The crux of my case was this:

One of the triggers for my September 4 essay was a then-breaking report from Reuters, which had just reported that after the famous Hugging Face incident there was another incident, involving the compromise of a German website. Once again OpenAI and told nobody for months.

As some said about Watergate, it wasn’t just about the break-in, but the cover-up.

At that point, the optics were so bad OpenAI was forced to put out a statement: