Washington (United States) (AFP) – Nvidia boss Jensen Huang and OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman are among the tech leaders expected to attend a White House state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping next week, a US official said Friday. “It’ll be a very popular and hot-ticketed event,” the official said on condition of anonymity, adding that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, SpaceX and Tesla chief Elon Musk, Apple head Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai will also attend.
Their presence comes as artificial intelligence is set to loom large in the talks between the two leaders, with the United States and China being the two dominant powers in the AI race. The AI debate in the US remains consumed by the idea that the country’s leading developers — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta — cannot afford to slow their pace of innovation, whatever the risks, for fear that China will pull ahead. China, long seen as trailing the United States on cutting-edge AI, has been closing that gap fast.
Washington has long tried to slow China’s progress with export controls on the advanced chips needed for cutting-edge AI, blocking access to top-end US semiconductors such as those made by Nvidia.
Despite their bitter rivalry, hope remains that the two superpowers can agree on something regarding the technology when the leaders meet in Washington. But anything ambitious, such as agreeing to slow development or craft global safeguards, is likely out of reach. The call for safeguards has been amplified by dire warnings from industry insiders about the threat the technology poses to humanity. Jacob Coxon, a former AI researcher at Anthropic, set off the latest round of alarm by describing how those building the technology “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published an essay soon after urging caution and a slowdown in development. Altman and Musk lent their support to that idea, as did Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, who himself has called for a US-led global regulatory body for the technology.
US President Donald Trump this week dismissed fears over AI as a hoax and is urging American AI companies to keep advancing to stay ahead of China. That tracks with Nvidia chief Huang, who told broadcaster CBS News, “we should go as fast as we can, irrespective of anybody else,” in an excerpt of an interview released Friday. “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,” Huang said in the interview, which is expected to air in full on Sunday. “But everybody’s expecting us to succeed and help America be as prosperous as possible,” he added.
According to analysts, Chinese policymakers have been more focused on immediate risks, from deepfakes to child safety. However, the country’s spy agency chief warned this week that the technology could jeopardize national security.
© 2024 AFP
