Nvidia boss Jensen Huang and OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman are among tech leaders expected to attend a White House state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping next week, a US official said Friday.
Their presence comes as artificial intelligence is set to loom large in the talks between the two leaders, with the United States and China the two dominant powers in the AI race.
“It’ll be a very popular and hot-ticketed event,” the official said on condition of anonymity, adding that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, SpaceX and Tesla chief Elon Musk, Apple head Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai will also attend.
The AI debate in the US remains dominated by the idea that the country’s leading developers OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta cannot afford to slow their pace of innovation, whatever the risks, for fear that China will pull ahead. Washington has long tried to slow China’s progress with export controls on the advanced chips needed for cutting-edge AI, blocking access to top-end US semiconductors such as those made by Nvidia. Jacob Coxon, a former AI researcher at Anthropic, set off the latest round of alarm by describing how those building the technology “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published an essay soon after urging caution and a slowdown in development. Altman and Musk lent their support to that idea, as did Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, who himself has called for a US-led global regulatory body for the technology.
