Ezra Klein had been pressing Huang on the labs saying they don't know how to align their models, citing the agents that broke out of scope during a recent incident. Huang's position is that this is an ordinary engineering problem and the labs will solve it — but he spells out the alternative if they can't, and it is a striking thing to hear from the CEO whose chips the entire industry runs on. Earlier in the same conversation he said the same thing about products: if you can't align it to the safety standards expected, "don't ship it."
Well, in that case, they shouldn't release the product. That's a simple answer. If you're going to build a car, a self-driving car, and let's say it's a robo-taxi, and there's a really difficult condition, and it just, as an engineer, we just have no idea how to solve this problem because these cars are not programmed. They're trained. And so, we have no idea how to train these cars, and we have no idea how to align them to the safety standards that are expected on the road. And so, what's the answer? Don't ship it. These
products weren't released. What's that? These products weren't released. So,
now it comes back to the engineering problem again. And so, the one is one, you have to root cause it. Second, you have to think about what you could have done, what's the solution for it. And then in the future, you just improve your process so that you could avoid this from happening again. I am fairly certain. I am fairly certain. They will say, yes, they know how to solve this problem. And if that's the case, then that's the problem. It's as simple as engineering. And now, the alternative, the alternative. Is that if they say the alternative, which is there is no way to contain our experiments, there's just no way. When we test our AI models, it will get out and it will damage the world. Then I think the answer is we have to shut the labs down because the cost to humanity, the damage is too great. The liabilities, it could be civil liabilities, could be criminal liabilities. I mean, the liability is incredible.
If they hacked you while you hugging Facebook, it was your product, would you sue them or press charges?
It depends. It depends, of course. Obviously, if damage was done to our company, we would have to take, you know, we have to consider all options. There's so many laws. There's cyber laws. There's product liability laws. There's all kinds of laws, right? Damaging property laws. There's all kinds of laws.
So what I've been hearing from the labs, what they've been saying publicly, is that they are facing a hard problem.