This Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang traveled to St. James's Palace in London to receive this year's Queen Elizabeth Award for Engineering. According to Huang, in addition to receiving the medal from King Charles, he also received a letter personally delivered by the King – a copy of a speech he delivered in 2023, which contained warnings about the risks of AI.
In an interview, Huang Renxun said, "The king said, 'There's something I want to talk to you about,' and then handed me a letter."
This letter was sent by King Charles at Bletchley Estate in 2023 to the world's first artificial intelligence conference . A copy of the speech delivered at the summit. In his speech, King Charles emphasized that people must address the risks of artificial intelligence with a “sense of urgency, a spirit of solidarity and collective strength.”
Huang Renxun stated, "This is his (the King's) speech on artificial intelligence security. Clearly, he attaches great importance to the issue of artificial intelligence security."
Jensen Huang revealed that King Charles wrote in his speech that he believed this technology had the "extraordinary power" to change Britain and the world... but he also reminded us that this technology could both benefit humanity and harm the world, therefore we must do everything in our power to advance the security of artificial intelligence. In his speech, he also compared the development of advanced artificial intelligence to "a breakthrough no less significant than the discovery of electricity."
The Queen Elizabeth Engineering Prize is an international engineering award established by the British government in 2011. Named after Queen Elizabeth II, it is awarded every two years to individuals or teams of three or fewer who have made groundbreaking contributions to the field of engineering worldwide.
The winners of this year's Queen Elizabeth Engineering Prize were actually announced back in February. This year's theme was modern machine learning, so the winners were entirely from the AI field, including Nobel laureates Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield, Turing Award winners Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, NVIDIA Chief Scientist Bill Dally, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang, and Fei-Fei Li, known as the "Godmother of AI."
Two of the award winners, Professors Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, had previously warned that AI technology could pose an existential threat to humanity.
However, compared to the British government's emphasis on AI security risks, the US government currently seems much less concerned. US President Trump has previously urged the AI industry to make rapid, rather than cautious, technological advancements. Earlier this year, the AI Security Summit held in France was renamed the AI Action Summit. The US Department of Commerce also renamed its AI Security Institute to the Center for AI Standards and Innovation.
In the interview, Huang added that, in his view, Britain is well-positioned to seize what he calls "the ongoing industrial revolution." "This is an opportunity that must be grasped," he emphasized.
Major US tech companies, including Nvidia, are spending billions of dollars building artificial intelligence infrastructure in the UK, including these giant data centers . It was called an "artificial intelligence factory" by Jensen Huang.
(Article source: CLS)
