Huang scandal's impact on future of AI

Is impacting so many different parts of the country from Washington, D.C. and Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Joining us now to talk about all of this and the ramifications, Cal State East Bay professor Nolan Higdon, who wrote a book, Critical AI Literacy from Silicon Valley Exploitation to Democratic Resistance. Good morning, professor. Thank you for joining us. Good morning. Thanks for having me. Um, certainly a very interesting topic. This is, uh, very different in terms of the circumstances, but Jensen Huang is similar to Bill Gates and Microsoft, Steve Jobs and Apple. Um, we talked earlier about like, to me, they're like a coach, right? Sometimes the team is very different with and without that coach. What do you think is about the effect of this, the impact of this going forward without Jensen Huang? Well, you know, I do think some of the examples you provided there illustrate that you can change leadership. But I think that the suddenness of this change is one thing that makes it very different. There wasn't a lot of time to prepare. I imagine, you know, they're they're they're working very hard to try and restructure in a post Jensen Huang world. But it's going to be challenging, as they didn't have a lot of heads up, and they're also under a lot of scrutiny at the very same time. So I think it puts the folks who are at NVIDIA in a really difficult spot. Yeah, and he really has been the face of AI also, right? Politically, talking with other tech companies, working with just about everybody as AI evolves and advances. We have Anthropic IPO next week. Um, you're so deeply involved in AI and, and really talking about how it ties in with education and how people can use AI. What do you think in terms of this scandal, um, tied in with the possible links to China and what that means for the AI industry? Well, I think this is a, you know, it points to another issue where Jensen Huang was very different, and that is that NVIDIA is a company right now that is responsible for a lot of the growth in the American economy. So much of the American economy under Trump's second term has been about the speculation about AI, whether or not these AI companies will achieve so-called artificial general intelligence. That's an intelligence that's similar to human intelligence. And they're going in debt to try and achieve that. And NVIDIA not only helps create the chips that make AI possible, it also is doing vendor financing. It's investing in a lot of the AI companies, including startups, betting that one day they will achieve this AGI. So, so much of our economic growth is also on this company. And so I think the idea of a foreign nation, particularly an adversary, gaining information about that company. I think this is something that has sent shockwaves politically because it has implications not only for government secrecy and intelligence, but also the economy at large. What do you expect going forward in terms of kind of reining that in, regulations, limits on all the technology, the tech companies, particularly involved in AI? What do you think will happen with that? Well, for the last 40 or so years, both parties have believed that any regulation or taxation on big tech was going to hurt the industry and thus hurt the economy. But I think there's been a change, especially in the last handful of years, in the ways that people feel about big tech. There's been a lot more criticisms of social media, AI, some of the figures in big tech. And you have this new wave of kind of progressive politicians coming into Congress who are talking about using government more. So I think you're going to see a lot more conversations about where government can regulate this industry. And I think that'll be some of the battles as Congress is going to fight over. OK, just want to leave everybody kind of on a more positive note, because you do talk about the positive side of AI and working with education. You're there at Cal State. Thank What do you see just kind of in terms of an optimistic look at AI and going forward? Yeah, I think like so much of Silicon Valley, AI is an example of how big tech often over-promises you and under-delivers. And I say that I don't think AI is going to hit any level of intelligence so anytime soon. But there's some menial tasks it does pretty well, much. you know, taking data, maybe alphabetizing it. Sometimes it can be a more effective search engine. So there are some small areas where I think it's of use, but I think right now it's being distributed to a lot of places where it can't do what it's being asked to do. All right. East Bay Professor Nolan Higdon, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. All right, let's head over.