Lenin supposedly said there are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen. This wasn’t one of those weeks.
It might have looked like a historic week. The AI circus rolled into the UN with Sam Altman and Dario Amodei addressing the Security Council on the peril facing “humanity as a whole.” Britain and Australia weighed in with middling diplomatic or regulatory AI initiatives of their own. Trump renamed AI as superintelligence.
But none of this changed anything. The UN continued its kabuki theater of making global pronouncements without having the power to change even the most local of things. Britain and Australia remained not-great powers with delusions of grandeur. In the autumn of his patriarchy, Trump continued to flail with pathetic powerlessness. And Dario and Sam increasingly seem like bit actors in the unfolding AI drama.
So where’s all the power in AI? What’s this week’s real story? In Ezra Klein’s New York Times conversation with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, which That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare called “an interview for the ages,” Huang, the CEO of the world’s most valuable company, reveals himself as the guy running the AI show.
The $5 trillion dollar man talks with the quiet authority of the AI headmaster, fearlessly scolding his riotous sixth form. And his most riotous pupils are Dario Amodei and Sam Altman. So, in response to their latest handwringing about AI’s existential threat to humanity, Huang’s message was unambiguous. If you can’t align it, “don’t ship it,” he said of these supposedly humanity-destroying AI products, and if you truly cannot contain your own experiments, “then I think the answer is that we have to shut the labs down.”
The most revealing part of the Klein interview was about Nvidia’s astonishing economic clout in the AI economy. Huang put his chip manufacturer’s investment in this ecosystem at around $100 billion — larger, as Klein noted, than Joe Biden’s entire CHIPS and Science Act. This guy has serious clout, equivalent to or perhaps even surpassing the US state. He doesn’t waste his time at the UN. He’s not running wannabe great powers like Australia or Britain. He doesn’t play senile semantic games like you-know-who.
Huang can lay down the law to Sam and Dario (and Trump) because he doesn’t fear them. As the Exponential View’s Azeem Azhar reveals in a revealing interview this week with Atlantic CEO Nick Thompson, Nvidia isn’t dependent on the walled garden innovators at OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither lab actually buys Huang’s hardware — they rent capacity from the cloud companies that do, which makes them tenants rather than customers. Meanwhile the cheaper and maybe even better open weight models now pouring out of China run on the same Nvidia silicon. Whoever wins the AI race, Jensen “Levi Strauss” Huang sells them the chips.
So Mr Chips to Sam and Dario: heads you lose, tails I win. Shut up or shut down. That’s what happened this week.
Five Takeaways
• The Theatre of the UN. Altman and Amodei went to the Security Council; Burnham offered Britain as honest broker; Trump suggested renaming AI superintelligence. Keith’s analogy: Facebook’s Libra.
• Huang Calls the Bluff. If the labs believe their own warnings, he says, they should be shut down, not regulated — because setting rules is not the same as having control.
• More Than the CHIPS Act. Nvidia has more invested in AI than the entire Biden CHIPS Act. The state is no longer the central player in the innovation economy.
• Not Dependent on OpenAI. Both labs are renters, not buyers of GPUs — part of why Huang can afford to attack them. The AI economy could prosper without either.
• Zuckerberg’s Return. Meta’s Muse takes the computer away: a cloud agent you talk to through earphones or glasses, free, funded by a cut of what it buys for you.
Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow
Chapters:
00:00:31 Introduction
00:02:16 A boringly static debate
00:03:55 Why the Security Council?
00:04:24 The Libra precedent
00:05:53 Liability, IPOs and rules
00:06:53 Burnham, the G20 and Britain
00:09:03 Albanese and the rogue agents
00:10:03 Can middle powers matter?
00:11:55 Rename it superintelligence
00:13:29 Bannon, Sanders and the base
00:15:16 Ezra Klein and Jensen Huang
00:16:44 Is Klein a doomer?
00:18:25 Under the bus
00:19:09 The engineer’s frame
00:20:01 Don’t ship it
00:21:37 Calling their bluff
00:23:54 Conviction or commerce?
00:25:26 The weak spot in his case
00:26:44 What social media taught us
00:28:06 Victimhood and blame
00:30:09 More than the CHIPS Act
00:31:30 Bottoms-up innovation
00:32:40 Azeem Azhar on the bubble
00:34:19 Renters and buyers
00:36:28 Life without OpenAI
00:37:42 Meta’s Muse
00:39:56 Taking the computer away
00:41:54 The business model
00:43:17 A $100 device
00:46:52 Winners and losers