Part Two of our Jensen Huang decoding gets to AI safety, where Jensen gives the labs some simple advice: if your products aren’t safe, don’t release them! There we go. Glad we got that sorted.

Luckily Jensen knows a lot of CEOs and he’s confident they want to do the right thing. Good CEOs and good engineers, doing good work. Reassuring stuff, although Volkswagen presumably had a few of those too when it was cheating on emissions tests. We’re slightly less inclined to treat Jensen’s confidence in his rich friends as a safety mechanism, particularly when he does rather well out of selling them chips.

Though to be fair, he seems a little more open to independent auditors and new regulations than some accounts of the interview suggest. Matt also offers some qualified reasons for optimism about AI safety research. So there are some things to discuss beyond whether we should trust all the nice billionaires.

We also cover his "interesting" environmental argument. To save the planet, Jensen explains, we’ll first have to do it quite a lot of damage. It’s like surgery: an ENORMOUS amount of pain now, with the promise that things might possibly get better afterwards. In this case, perhaps some more solar plants. For operations usually they give you anaesthetics, but a lovely new park next to the data centre will maybe do the same job.

In short, there’s plenty of out-of-touch billionaire optimism here, and a convenient overlap between what’s good for the future/planet and what’s good for Nvidia sales. But even with all that, Jensen remains a bit short on the guru flair we usually encounter. C'est la vie!

• The Ezra Klein Show: Jensen Huang Thinks A.I. Alarmism Has Gone Too Far
• I Think You Should Leave: Hot Dog Car Sketch (Netflix Is A Joke)
• Piece of Shit Book Club: How to Become a Christian in Seven Days by Russell Brand
• Russell Brand: How to Become a Christian in Seven Days
• You Can See Everything: Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's Elizabeth Holmes documentary

• Pacing the Frontier: The AI employees' open letter quoted in the interview
• Nick Cammarata / Goodfire: Neural Networks Are Already Clean
• US Environmental Protection Agency: Learn About Volkswagen Violations (Dieselgate)

Jensen Huang is so hot right now; not only did he make some statements that were widely derided, but he also featured in a glitzy "collab" episode with our favourite lone wolf, Lex Fridman. Sensing guru vibes, we turned to take a deep dive into his recent interview with Ezra Klein. Huang is the co-founder and CEO of Nvidia; he also really likes Lex Fridman and the All-In Besties. Trump even called him while he was on the All-In stage! So it's fair to say we went into this one expecting yet another bloviating tech CEO and were ready to join the dunking. We do not do guilt by association, of course, but bad vibes were in the air.

Huang thinks AI will transform the economy, take over tedious tasks, and leave us free to do more interesting things. Some jobs will disappear, but new industries will emerge to replace them, like wellness spas... It's okay for those whose jobs are disappearing, though Jensen has a solution: they should become systems thinkers!

Alongside such high-level insights, Matt and Chris do find some points of agreement, including his impatience with apocalyptic predictions being presented as scientific findings. The discussion also highlights a difference between our dear hosts: Huang's irritation with people talking about software like little human minds makes Chris increasingly sympathetic to him. Matt, as a committed pan-psychic, is less impressed by the reassurance that engineers understand what they are building, and thinks understanding the components is rather different from knowing what the whole system will do. Inevitably, this leads to a discussion of dogs, ants, and what "unpredictable" means, because apparently we are sensemakers now.

We will get to the fuller discussion of AI safety in Part Two. Until then, listeners can enjoy the experience of us listening to one of the less terrible tech billionaires and disagreeing with each other over minor points!

• The Ezra Klein Show: Jensen Huang Thinks A.I. Alarmism Has Gone Too Far
• The New York Times: Episode page and transcript
• Lex Fridman: Taiwan: The Most Epic Night Market Experience w/ Jensen Huang (the Taiwan visit mentioned in the introduction)
• All-In Summit: Jensen Huang: The Doomer Hoax, Superintelligence is Here, and The Future of AI (ft. President Trump)
• Creative Destruction Lab: Geoff Hinton: On Radiology (2016)
• Kurzgesagt: AI Just Crossed the Terrifying Line - Now What? (previously titled The Moment They Lost Control of AI)

• Vaswani et al. (2017): Attention Is All You Need
• Anthropic: When AI builds itself
• METR: Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident
• Anthropic: 2026 Usage Policy update (including its policy on abusive treatment of models)