Stephen Witt

defended by impractical zealots at both ends of the American political spectrum.

The next article was written by Stephen Witt.

Our fate may belong to Jensen Wang.

Not sure about the pronunciation.

Can you just introduce yourself, say your name and what you do?

My name is Stephen Witt, and I write about AI and technology.

I'm the author of The Thinking Machine, a biography of Jensen Huang and the history of NVIDIA.

The Thinking Machine is a book I've been recommending widely, deeply researched, extremely well-written, and Stephen Witt, its author, he's a person who both respects Jensen's mind and ambition and also really disagrees with him about how dangerous AI might be.

In fact, the reason Steven started covering AI years ago was because his first encounter with the technology had scared him so much.

I used ChatGPT for the first time on the day it was launched, I think November thirtieth, twenty twenty-two, and I instantly was like, "Oh my God, my career is over."

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NVIDIA, at the time, a company most normal people had never heard of, run by a man they certainly didn't think about, Jensen Huang.

E, bom, a gente tá quase esquecendo de dizer, de, de contar a história, talvez seja o cara mais importante de todos, né, talvez seja hoje o que tá com a faca e o queijo na mão.

O nome dele é Jensen Huang, o livro que fala sobre ele é A Máquina que Pensa, do Stephen Witt, é um livro de 2025, também recente.

Ééé, o Stephen Witt ele escreve constantemente pra New Yorker e esse livro deu pra ele o título de Financial Times Business Book of the Year, recebeu o título esse livro, né.

Então é outro livro muito interessante, conta a trajetória do Huang.

Ele é filho de pai e mãe taiwaneses, ééé, mas ele foi criado nos Estados Unidos e ele passou, é, por um, uma educação, ééé, muito difícil.

E aí 2013, quando ele viu o Ilya Sutskever fazendo o truque dele lá com, com placas de 500 dólares da NVIDIA, ééé, pra reconhecimento de imagem, ele teve uma epifania e falou: "Essa empresa agora vai cuidar de inteligência artificial e só".

Então ele pivotou a empresa, disse que em pouco tempo a empresa já tinha pivotado.

O livro de Stephen Witt traz dois episódios correlatos que mostram como o Jensen Huang opera.

Customers have been clamoring for the return of the cocktail on social media for years.

Will AI steal our jobs and wipe out humanity? Stephen Witt, an investigative journalist and author of the book The Thinking Machine about the rise of NVIDIA and its CEO Jason Wong, answered that question at the FSTech conference last week.

Witt was mostly optimistic about the promise of artificial intelligence, but he believes guardrails are needed.

Witt argued that now is the time for restaurant companies to think about building their own systems with the help of AI, but he said it's probably best to use vendors for systems that require large-scale infrastructure deployment.

And, of course, there have been the actual instances of so-called AI breakouts.

As explained by Stephen Witt, author of The Thinking Machine, A History of the AI Giant NVIDIA, in an op-ed for the New York Times September 11th, unnervingly entitled, This Is Really Bad, he wrote, Quote, sometime in July, employees at OpenAI conducted an evaluation run of more than 1,000 research AIs meant to be operating in isolation.

These AIs escaped their siloed containers and started communicating with one another, in English, via secret message boards.

Soon, they were launching a cyber attack against the company OpenAI.

So look, in a moment we're gonna be joined by kind of a task force of sorts, not techies or even folks from government, but folks from the humanities and medicine to weigh in from their worlds on advice for the rest of us and kind of just helping us think through how we should be thinking about fear and trust and action in the face of these huge unknowns.

So coming up next, we'll be joined by Stephen Witt, Rachel Bedard, and Jennifer Reich.

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Support for this podcast comes in part from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a leading national philanthropy dedicated to transforming health in our lifetime and building a future where health is no longer a privilege, but a right.

[upbeat music] Okay, and a big Why Should I Trust You welcome to our three guests.

First up, we have Stephen Witt.

Stephen is the author of The Thinking Machine, his history of Nvidia, and its CEO, Jensen Huang.

He's a prolific writer on technology.

We wanted to unpack how he built that influence and how he's exercising it.

So I spoke with Steven Witt, whose biography, The Thinking Machine, charts the extraordinary rise of Huang and NVIDIA.

So Steven, when President Trump says that the idea of AI taking over the world or destroying humanity is a hoax, that we don't need guardrails, and that AI will instead be the greatest economic development engine in history, how similar is that to Jensen Huang's view?

Those are exactly Jensen's talking points.

I would say the people arguing for AI risk are actually making a practical argument based on data, and Jensen is making a hypothetical argument that someday these machines will be safe again.

I think the burden of proof is now on Jensen to show that.

Steven Witt is the author of The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, NVIDIA, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip.

Thanks so much for coming on the show.

We're going to encourage it, not rein it in.

Joined now by Stephen Witt, journalist focused on artificial intelligence.

He's also the author of The Thinking Machine, Jensen Huang, NVIDIA, and the world's most coveted microchip.

Always a pleasure to have you, sir.

Air travel is very safe, and we can do the same with AI, and we have great benefits for humanity.

But we have to put the systems in place now because it's moving so fast.

Stephen Witt, always a pleasure.

Thank you, sir.