JH Jensen Huang Co-founder, president and CEO of Nvidia, the company he started in 1993 and which grew from graphics chips into accelerated computing and AI infrastructure.

“AI needs to accelerate to be safe. I want them to get more compute, but allocated towards evaluation, to alignment.”

The Ezra Klein Show · Ideas & Essays · September 2026

Context

Ezra Klein pressed Huang on lab researchers who say they are losing the ability to evaluate their own models. Huang's answer was that most labs today put roughly 80% of their effort into capability and 20% into safety and verification, and that the ratio should flip — at NVIDIA, he said, 80% goes to verification. He compared it to wishing the car industry had reached today's braking technology ninety-nine years sooner.

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Transcript

The Ezra Klein Show Around 1:25:43 into the episode

Jensen Huang

…are working every single day to learn about how to evaluate these systems. Verification, so you know, 10%, 20% of our company is dedicated to design, 80% is dedicated to verification. Today, most labs, understandably, is 80% dedicated to capability and 20% dedicated to safety, verification, eval.

Ezra Klein

This is the flip. This transition you're talking about. That's right.

Jensen Huang

That's right. AI needs to accelerate to be safe. I want them to get more compute, but allocated towards evaluation, to alignment. And I think they're doing that. If I were in the car industry 100 years ago, I would rather the car industry accelerated to today in one year because I believe today's car is way more safe than a car 99 years ago. And ABS technology, automatic breaking, requires computer vision technology, sensor fusion technology, radars and cameras, and all that technology coming together in order to break…

Ezra Klein

It's funny because I think that if the most alarmed people at the labs could be assured they were going to move 80% of their compute into safety and alignment as opposed to 80% into capability expansion, they would feel much better. And it sounds stopping them from doing that. And it sounds to me…

Jensen Huang

It's like us saying, oh, chip design is chip is chips, is RD. Chip verification is not RD. We spend most of our cost, most of our compute on verification. Emulation, verification, testing, reliability testing, lifetime testing, all of that is part of engineering. The incentives are there. The…

Ezra Klein

Do you think we need liability laws that are specific to AI?

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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