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SW Stephen Witt On Hard Fork (NYT)

“His point of view is he's looking at it from the microchip up. He's saying, I have complete control over each individual component here. And so if I'm losing control somewhere along the system, that just means it's an engineering failure and we know how to fix engineering failures. … Dario and Sam and the other people who are more worried, they're looking at it from the top down and they're saying, I don't know how this thing works. It's extremely powerful and I might lose control of it.”

Hard Fork (NYT) · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026

“His point of view is he's looking at it from the microchip up. He's saying, I have complete control over each individual component here. And so if I'm losing control somewhere along the system, that just means it's an engineering failure and we know how to fix engineering failures. … Dario and Sam and the other people who are more worried, they're looking at it from the top down and they're saying, I don't know how this thing works. It's extremely powerful and I might lose control of it.” — Stephen Witt, Hard Fork (NYT)

Context

Asked whether a weakened Jensen Huang would change how policymakers think about AI risk, his biographer Stephen Witt explains why the Nvidia CEO sees AI as a controllable tool while lab leaders worry about losing control.

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Transcript

Hard Fork (NYT) Around 27:11 into the episode
Stephen Witt

…Google, who are all manufacturing rival microchips. Google, in particular, has really started to become one of NVIDIA's top rivals. So, NVIDIA has a number of significant business risks outside of this spy scandal that it already faced. And I think some of that was priced into the stock as well.

Speaker 3

…pressing him on this belief. So, my question is: what happens if AI's biggest, least afraid booster loses power, loses credibility, like we've been saying? Do policymakers change their sense of what AI is? I mean, is there a, is this, is this change the direction of AI development in the future?

Stephen Witt

…and powerful advocate for that point of view. His point of view is he's looking at it from the microchip up. He's saying, I have complete control over each kind of individual component here. And so if I'm losing control somewhere along the system, that just means it's an engineering failure and we know how to fix engineering failures. So I'm sort of parroting his point of view. You know, from Dario and Sam and the other people who are more worried, they're looking at it from the top down and they're saying, I don't know how this thing works. It's extremely powerful and I might lose control of it. So that's a really different point of view. I think that Jensen Huang lost this one. I've noticed even Trump has started to talk a little bit more about, you know, well, maybe we'll regulate it a little bit. I think the Democratic wave that was just put into power had a number of reasons, including oil prices that they went. But it seems like voters were very concerned about AI. I think Trump's…

Speaker 3

Yeah. All right, Stephen, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a really enlightening and elucidating conversation. I really appreciate you making the time at 3.30 in the morning in Singapore from your hotel room. Yeah, the book is The Thinking Machine. It's a great read if you're at all…

Stephen Witt

Thank you so much.

Speaker 1

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

More from Hard Fork (NYT)

“There's Jensen. There's nobody in the second tier. And then there's 60 people who report directly to him. … If he is compromised, if he has to step down, if in some way he can't do his job, that's uniquely damaging for NVIDIA. NVIDIA has grown so large that it's now like a linchpin of the American economy. So there's this giant key man risk, not just for NVIDIA, but actually to some extent for the entire U.S. economy around this guy.” — Stephen Witt, Hard Fork (NYT) “Of the sort of 45 gigawatts or so of total energy that's supposed to come online next year, 10 to 15 gigawatts of that could now be in danger of not coming online because it's in Texas, because they all expected that the moratorium that was put on for building data centers in Texas up through the elections would just be removed… This is going to slow down a lot of the AI development. This is going to make compute capacity much more constrained and ergo much more expensive.” — Erin Griffith, Hard Fork (NYT)