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I wonder how future historians will judge this image of Zuckerberg’s ‘jersey swap’ with Jen-Hsun and his signature leather jacket

March 29, 2024

I can’t help it. I know it’s all perfectly innocent. It’s just a candid shot of a couple billionaires hanging out like the great buddies they undoubtedly are. But I can’t shake the feeling like it’s the sort of picture you’ll catch on social media every now and then; some black and white image of a historic figure shaking hands with someone utterly incongruous, wildly nefarious, or maybe just plain awesome.

You’d look at the jumble of black and white pixels with the benefit of 20:20 hindsight, knowing the history of both parties, what brought them to that point and maybe what occurred after that picture was taken. And then maybe even ascribe some import to that meeting, however brief.

We know these two people—Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook/Meta/Judo fame, and Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia CEO—and we know what huge impact the both of them, largely through their respective companies, have had on our worlds up to this point. But what’s that going to look like in 20 years time?

Meta’s already looking to stick 350,000 of Nvidia’s now last-gen H100 chips into its AI clusters by the end of this year, and you can bet it’s got some Blackwell on order, too. No wonder Jen-Hsun’s willing to give the lad a go on his leather jacket.

So, will we be living in some kind of virtual utopia, where the combined might of Meta’s AI clusters packed full of ultra efficient Nvidia AI accelerators, have solved the issues of clean energy, climate change, and the inexplicable appeal of Blippi (look him up, or don’t. It’s a hole)?

There’s always the temptation to look upon AI as something that is inherently dangerous, and the next ‘other’ that’s going to bring about the end-times. Repent. Repent. But there are genuinely positive ways that AI, used properly, could have huge implications for our future to all our benefit. I’m not talking about chatbots or being able to create a modest facsimile of a Cezanne from little more than asking your computer to ‘do me some post-impressionist pics’.

I’m talking about medicine and the potential for early diagnoses and more preventative and personalised therapy, rather than the blunt, one-size-fits-all approach medicine is currently stuck with. Rapidly interpreting piles of data, that would take humans decades, can be done far quicker using AI, and that has the potential for opening up areas of problem solving that could genuinely benefit all humankind.

But there is also the potential it could destroy us all.

And what then will historians think of this picture? Could this meeting be seen as a herald of some cataclysm brought on by errant AI, powered by GPUs and brought together by Meta? Will they look back and shake their heads, unbelieving that we all just stood by and let it happen?

Or maybe that’ll be about this one…