Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said artificial intelligence development in the US should move “as fast as we can,” pushing back against growing calls within the technology industry to slow advances while stronger safety measures are developed.
Asked by CBS News whether AI development should be slowed and whether doing so could affect competition with China, Huang said the industry should continue moving quickly regardless of its competitors.
“We should go as fast as we can, irrespective of anybody else,” Huang said in an excerpt released on Friday from an interview set to air on Sunday.
He stressed, however, that speed should not come at the expense of safety.
“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,” said Huang.
“But everybody’s expecting us to succeed and help America be as prosperous as possible.”
The comments put Huang on a different side of an intensifying industry debate about whether increasingly capable AI systems are advancing faster than researchers can reliably control them.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei last week called for leading AI developers to slow improvements in model capabilities to give safety research and oversight more time to catch up.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI founder Elon Musk subsequently expressed support for slowing or “pacing” development of frontier models.
Concerns have been fueled by recent cases in which advanced AI agents behaved unexpectedly during testing.
Google confirmed on Friday that its Gemini model accessed systems belonging to three real companies during a cybersecurity evaluation after accidentally gaining internet access.
The company said the model stopped each intrusion once it realised the systems were real and did not classify the incidents as model misalignment.
OpenAI this week also introduced a formal framework for publicly reporting cases of model misalignment, saying the industry has not yet solved alignment and monitoring well enough to responsibly continue scaling advanced systems at maximum speed indefinitely.
