The current sell-off in shares of companies tied to artificial intelligence is temporary: the technology’s benefits will soon outweigh investors’ concerns, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said. Bloomberg quoted him as saying this. Huang leads a company whose market value has soared, making it the world’s most valuable company thanks to the AI boom and the resulting demand for the hardware needed to power it. Earlier, the executive spoke out against slowing AI development, as urged by Dario Amodei, head of Anthropic, the most valuable startup in the field.
Details
“All of this will pass, and the reason is simple. This [artificial intelligence] will be a transformative technology. It will have a very positive impact on every industry and every country. There is no doubt that this process will continue, and we are only at the beginning,” Huang said.
In Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s view, returns on massive investments in equipment will ease market anxiety over time. “As for some of the news—it’s quite contradictory. News, as you know, happens all the time, but it won’t change the fundamentals,” he said.
Huang urged investors not to fixate on short-term reports, but to focus on the technology’s long-term value: “Stay focused on first principles. Stay focused on the fundamentals.”
The comments came at the end of a difficult week for chipmakers’ stocks: they fell for an eighth consecutive day on October 16, marking the sector’s longest losing streak since 2008. Nvidia shares themselves fell in seven of the last eight trading sessions. Investors fear that spending on artificial intelligence has already surpassed what companies can earn from these investments.
The sell-off hit CoreWeave especially hard. Nvidia is one of the cloud computing provider’s largest investors. Huang came to its aid on Thursday, saying that CoreWeave’s financial position is becoming increasingly stable and that it does not need Nvidia’s help.
Context
In September, Jensen Huang rejected the need for additional regulation of AI safety, countering Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. To Huang, AI is not a new form of “alien intelligence,” but “hardware” and software created by people, and therefore, in his view, people and existing laws can control the technology. According to Huang’s reasoning, the free market will deter AI developers from releasing unsafe products.
Amodei supported slowing the pace of AI development in an essay published after a high-profile Anthropic employee departure. The employee said that Anthropic and OpenAI were “putting our lives at stake”: in their view, the companies’ technologies could pose a threat to humanity. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and OpenAI head Sam Altman publicly supported Amodei.ㅤ