Donald Trump and Jensen Huang both took the stage at Davos today, giving attendees a myriad of reasons to feel assured or panic stricken about humanity’s future, depending on your point of view.
In a delayed and wide-ranging speech, the American president tilted at windmills, expressed his love for Europe while lamenting its demise, impersonated Emmanuel Macron's voice, and suggested he wouldn’t use military force to take Greenland, which he described as a “big, beautiful piece of ice”.
“We won’t get anything unless I use excessive strength and force, when we would be unstoppable. I won’t use force,” he said. But he added, the US would remember if it didn’t get what it wanted.
“[It’s] very important we use it for national and international security,” he said in a Q&A session afterwards, adding: “We’ll see what happens.”
Zeroing in on AI, Trump said, “We're leading the world in AI by a lot. We're leading China by a lot. I think President Xi respects what we've done.”
In part, he said, this leadership was because “I've allowed these big companies building these massive buildings, to build their own electric capacity.”
Companies wanting to build out datacenters had run into the challenge of the US’ aging grid, Trump said. But the president claims he invented a solution. “And I came up with the idea. ‘You know, you people are brilliant. You have a lot of money. Let's see what you can do. You can build your own electric generating plants.’
“And they looked at me, they didn't believe me,” said Trump.
But he told the tech titans, that “Not only am I not kidding, you're going to have your approvals within two weeks.” At least for electricity. “Nuclear will take three weeks.”
This was the complete opposite to what is happening in Europe thanks to the “radical left” he said. “The United Kingdom produces just one third of the total energy from all sources that it did in 1999. Think of that. One third and they're sitting on top of the North Sea, one of the greatest reserves anywhere in the world, but they don't use it.”
Towards the end of his long, long speech, Trump returned to the theme of defending Western Culture, and the need to “Rediscover the spirit that lifted the west from the depths of the Dark Ages to the pinnacle of human achievement” in a rapidly changing world.
AI was part of that change, he said. “I mean, AI, two years ago, nobody ever heard of the term, and now everybody's talking about it,” he told the audience. “And it can have some very good purpose. It could also have some dangerous purpose, and for that, we have to watch out.”
Trump was speaking shortly after Nvidia boss Huang sketched out the latest iteration of his view of AI, pushing back on suggestions of an AI bubble, and also raising the energy issue.
Huang said AI was a five layer cake, with the need for energy at the bottom, with value created at the top, application layer.
At the same time, he touted the promise of agentic AI, and of robotics and physical AI.
Huang insisted that the technology was not destroying jobs. Rather, he said, it was increasing the demand for skilled labor around chip manufacturing, power, and datacenter construction. He added that Europe was arguably better placed in terms of “trades” than the US.
At the same time, AI is helping address skills shortages in key areas such as medicine, lowering the admin burden on nurses, or speeding up diagnoses by radiologists.
But while Trump focused on the US dominating the AI world, Huang touted its adoption by other countries, not least through open models.
“I really believe that that every country should get involved to build AI infrastructure, build your own AI, take advantage of your fundamental natural resources, which is your language and culture.”
Asked if there was a bubble, Huang suggested that there was not enough VC investment in AI. More to the point, he said: “If you try to rent an Nvidia GPU [in the cloud] in these days, it's so incredibly hard, and the spot price of GPU rentals is going up, not the latest generation, but two generation old GPUs.”
Huang’s internationalist approach was not shared by fellow AI big wigs. As The Reg revealed yesterday, Anthropic boss Dario Amodei railed against Nvidia and the White House for OK-ing the export of H200 chips, as well as AMD parts, to China.
The US was ahead of China in its silicon capabilities, he said. So it was a "a big mistake" to ship those parts, one with "incredible national security implications".
"It’s a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and [bragging that] Boeing made the casings." ®
Source: The register