①This Wednesday, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang traveled to St. James's Palace in the UK to receive this year’s Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering; ②According to Huang, he also received a letter personally handed over by King Charles – a copy of a speech delivered by the King in 2023, which contained warnings about the risks of AI.
Cailian Press News on November 6 (Editor: Xiaoxiang) On Wednesday this week, $NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$ NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang traveled to St James’s Palace in the UK to receive this year’s Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. According to Huang, in addition to receiving the medal from King Charles, he was also handed a personal letter from the King—Charles gave him a copy of a speech he delivered in 2023, which included a warning about the risks of AI.
In an interview, Huang stated, 'The King said, “There is something I want to discuss with you,” and then handed me a letter.'
The letter was a copy of a speech delivered by King Charles at the world's first Global Artificial Intelligence Summit held at Bletchley Park in 2023. In the speech, King Charles emphasized that people must address the risks of artificial intelligence with 'a sense of urgency, unity, and collective strength.'
Huang remarked, 'It was his (the King’s) speech on AI safety. Clearly, he places immense importance on the issue of AI safety.'
Huang revealed that in the speech, King Charles wrote that he believed this technology possesses 'extraordinary potential' to transform not only the UK but also the world… However, he also reminded us that while this technology can benefit humanity, it also has the potential to cause harm, thus necessitating every effort to advance AI safety. In his speech, he compared the development of advanced AI to 'a breakthrough no less significant than the discovery of electricity.'
The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering is an international award in the field of engineering established by the UK government in 2011, named after the late Queen Elizabeth II. It is awarded biennially to individuals or teams of up to three members who have made groundbreaking contributions to the field of engineering globally.
The list of winners for this year’s Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering was actually announced as early as February. This year’s theme was modern machine learning, meaning all recipients came 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 awardees, Yoshua Bengio and Professor Geoffrey Hinton, had previously warned that AI technology could pose an existential threat to humanity.
However, compared to the UK government’s emphasis on AI safety risks, the US government appears to take a much more relaxed stance. Former President Trump has urged the AI industry to pursue rapid rather than cautious technological advancements. Earlier this year, the AI Safety Summit held in France was renamed the AI Action Summit. The US Department of Commerce also renamed its AI Safety Institute as the Center for AI Standards and Innovation.
Jensen Huang added during the interview that, in his view, the UK is well-positioned to seize what he referred to as 'the industrial revolution currently underway.' 'This is an opportunity that must be seized,' he emphasized.
Major U.S. technology companies, including NVIDIA, are investing billions of dollars to build artificial intelligence infrastructure in the UK. These massive data centers have been dubbed 'AI factories' by Jensen Huang.
Editor /rice