“Regulate the products”: Nvidia’s Huang pushes back on AI rules at King Charles’s summit

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, has stated that AI should not be subject to the same regulations as social media since it is a technology, not a product.

According to POLITICO, Huang made these comments to journalists on Thursday at the AI event held by King Charles at Dumfries House in Scotland.

As Huang pointed out, social media is a product, whereas AI is a technology that underpins other technologies and products; therefore, the products should be regulated.

He stated that AI was “very different from social media” and that the security issues it now has were “due to products that had not been ready for release”.

Regarding the sectors in which AI is employed, such as healthcare, transport and entertainment, he said that these already have their own regulations.

He added that authorities should keep an eye out for instances in which an AI deployment “goes wrong” and that “whenever new laws are needed, those laws should be added to the existing ones”.

In response to the safety concerns, Huang said that the products should undergo strict testing in sealed laboratories before being made available to the public, describing this as

“…good old-fashioned engineering, that’s all it is. It’s not any more than that and not any less than that.”

“This is no different than, you know, an omelet’s not ready to be released, or a car is not ready to be released, an airplane engine’s not ready to be released,” he said. “You should properly test it.”

He reiterated the point in his formal speech at the meeting, in the presence of the King and representatives from OpenAI and Anthropic.

“If a product is not safe enough, we should delay it and continue with engineering; we have always taken that approach and must continue to do so,” he said.

The comments distinguished Huang from the top executives of two of Nvidia’s largest customers. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, had previously called for a reduction in frontier AI development, and Sam Altman of OpenAI supported this view, warning that “we could lose control”.

The King adopted a more cautious tone in what he said, as the Associated Press reported, he described the pace of AI development as “intriguing and deeply concerning in equal measure” and asked:

“Surely, we need adequate means of control before it is all too late?”

The meeting, at which Google DeepMind’s chair, Demis Hassabis, and the UK’s AI minister, Kanishka Narayan, also took part, was not expected to result in binding agreements.