U.S. intelligence was hardly going to miss Nvidia’s founder and chief cuddling up with a woman secretly connected to Chinese intelligence. Which raises a question: Did China’s government target Jensen Huang for information—or to compromise a technologist closely connected to Donald Trump?
Harrumph. But now the term has been universally adopted for the presumably looming catastrophic event that will drive U.S. politicians, in panicked fashion, to take a more hands-on approach to AI. But it takes two to tango and China’s government gives off mixed signals. Encouragingly, it recently drafted rules to halt open-weight exports if necessary. Then there’s the Nvidia caper. Mr. Huang’s paramour is a Chinese executive serving with a Singapore-based tech company. U.S. allies reportedly believe she was approached by Chinese intelligence after she took up with Mr. Huang. In a world overflowing with technical surveillance and information-theft opportunities, it seems a tad unrealistic that China would resort to an attention-getting, easy-to-expose honey-trap for Mr. After all, Mr. Huang was already a noisy and completely open advocate of selling China all the advanced Nvidia chips it wants, despite resistance from both the Biden and Trump administrations. AI technology has exited the barn irretrievably, rendering many flavors of AI doom academic. The job of humanity is to keep stepping forward with all the care and foresight it can muster in the name of civilization, which at last report is known to exist on one planet. Mr. Trump and Nvidia’s board may well decide the next job is saving Mr. Huang’s CEOship. Unfortunately he doesn’t have an Al Gore on his board. Mr.
Gore, at a crucial moment, intervened with a whitewash report in late 2006 to save Apple’s Steve Jobs from the options-backdating furor then taking down many less-protected or more-dispensable CEOs.
A large language model tells me I didn’t coin the term “AI Chernobyl” in a May 2023 column .
An AI researcher on YouTube used the phrase a few weeks earlier.
