Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang ‘nearly lost his composure’ when pressed on selling chips to China — ‘You’re not talking to someone who woke up a loser’

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang got into a heated debate during a recent podcast, during which he talked with Dwarkesh Patel about whether the U.S. should be selling chips to China. During part of the conversation, which you can see by expanding the tweet embedded below, Patel said he doesn’t know whether it’s actually good to give Chinese access to AI chips. Still, since he likes to play devil’s advocate during his interviews, where he takes an opposing stance to his guest, he asked the leather-clad chief of the world’s largest AI chipmaker if doing so is a threat to American companies and national security.

Patel gave Anthropic’s Claude Mythos as an example for his argument, which apparently revealed “thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities” in “every major operating system and every major web browser.” He said that if China had access to the massive amounts of compute that Nvidia delivers, it could probably have used it to develop cyber-offensive capabilities that threaten the United States’ security. Huang had a fairly nuanced response to this, but he also first pointed out that Mythos was trained on “fairly mundane capacity, and a fairly mundane amount of it.”