Jensen Huang calls AI doomsday predictions 'irresponsible,' tells scholars to stop

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Wednesday (local time) that warnings about AI causing human extinction lack scientific grounding, and told the scholars behind such forecasts to stop making them.

Speaking in an interview on "The Ezra Klein Show," published by The New York Times, Huang took direct aim at Geoffrey Hinton, an emeritus professor at the University of Toronto known as the "godfather of AI," who has said he puts the probability of AI-driven societal collapse at around 10 percent. "I would say that's irresponsible," Huang said. "His predictions have all not come true."

"The 10 percent probability is not based on science," Huang said. "Just because a scientist says something doesn't make it science. Those kinds of predictions are harmful." He added that sounding alarms does not necessarily help society. "We need to be smarter, more mature, and grounded in objective evidence and science," he said.

Hinton has mentioned on several recent public occasions that he believes AI carries a 10 to 20 percent chance of wiping out humanity.

Hinton, whose research on artificial neural networks and deep learning laid the groundwork for the AI boom, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2024. He also recently told lawmakers in a closed-door congressional briefing that Congress could lose control of AI if it fails to put safeguards in place within a year.

In a separate CBS interview that aired Sunday (local time), Huang said "2030 will not be the end of the world" and put the odds of that happening at zero. "Frightening people is unnecessary and irresponsible," he said.

Beyond Hinton, Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic researcher who recently quit over concerns about AI safety, caused a stir when he posted on X that tech companies are "gambling with our lives" as they race to build self-improving AI models that could go out of control. He wrote that engineers "genuinely believe" AI could kill all of humanity within a decade.

Huang, whose company supplies hardware to AI systems, pushed back on such concerns, saying they are "not based on science," and said ensuring the AI industry develops products responsibly is directly in Nvidia's own interest.

On calls to slow down AI development, Huang urged people to "read between the lines." "They're not actually asking for more regulation — they're asking to be shielded from liability under existing laws, and I think that's a problem," he said.

At an event in Los Angeles on Sept. 14, Huang also said, "We will go as fast as we can, but we should never ship a product that is not ready or not safe. And we won't."

During that event, US President Donald Trump called Huang on stage and criticized calls to slow AI development as politically motivated or a Chinese ploy, calling it a "scam." Huang agreed.