303. The Norm

Jensen Huang says society needs new social norms for AI.

Jensen Huang is the CEO of Nvidia. Nvidia makes the graphics processing units — the GPUs — that run nearly all of the AI being discussed when people discuss AI needing new social norms. The company was founded in 1993. For the first thirty years of its existence it made chips that helped video games look more realistic. Around 2012, researchers discovered that these same chips were extremely good at training artificial neural networks, which turned out to be the architecture that made modern AI possible. Jensen Huang saw this early. He invested in it. Nvidia is now worth approximately three trillion dollars.

(What this means: the hardware inside every AI model that a thoughtful person might worry about was, with high probability, made by or designed to work with Nvidia. The anxiety about AI and the company that built the machines producing the anxiety have the same CEO.)

Jensen Huang says society needs new social norms for AI.

He is correct. He has not specified which norms. This makes sense because specifying which norms is the harder part. He did the other part, which was building the hardware, for thirty-three years before mentioning the norms.

Society is now working on the norms. This is being done on laptops with Nvidia GPUs.

The existing social norm for new technology is that the people who build it say it needs new social norms approximately ten years after it has already reshaped society. This norm is holding.

Jensen Huang recommends new norms. This recommendation was delivered at a conference. The conference was processed by AI. The AI ran on Nvidia chips.

Everything is proceeding in the expected sequence.