Jensen Huang: “We’re going to make sure that everybody wins”

You’re standing in socks at Heathrow Airport. Belt in a grey tray, laptop out, toothpaste in a little plastic bag.

Nobody in that queue thinks it stops anyone, but you do it because 25 years ago, fear became an actionable government policy.

Back then – in America at least – it was called the PATRIOT Act.

And soon enough, every government around the world had its own version. The mass surveillance state was born, and the centralised powers of the world never looked back.

Whether you liked it or not, all of this was done, for your own safety and for your own good.

The thing is, you also never had a choice.

Twenty-five years on, fear is about to become an actionable government policy again.

When the end of civilisation is apparently staring us in the face, who’s going to save us from it all?

The government, of course.

Or at least that’s what the policy shadow masters want you to believe.

If we’re not careful, the next quarter of a century will be further defined by a select few, in their ivory towers, calling the shots because they think it’s what’s good for you and your safety.

Over the weekend three of the most influential people in artificial intelligence, Dario Amodei (CEO of Anthropic), Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI), and Elon Musk (CEO of xAI) all concurred: AI needs a pause and it’s out of control.

Dario posted an essay, “We Must Pace the Frontier,” saying the industry should slow down.

He also pledged to give outside evaluators permanent, employee-level access to Anthropic’s models.

Elon Musk replied with three words, “Dario is right.”

Sam Altman said evaluators are “a good idea” and that OpenAI would follow.

Altman then told Fortune the OpenAI float is off for 2026, because “right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public.”

Only months ago, two of this bunch were in a courtroom stoush. And their public disdain for each other was very much in the public eye.

Now all of a sudden they’re in cahoots?

Mmm.

And boy, have the political chancers jumped all over this. Calls for regulation, standards, laws, rules, bans… all of it to “protect” us all from AI killing us.

Please…

If you think something fishy is going on, I suspect you’re absolutely right, because something smells very bad about all this, all at once.

All-in says all this is not what they say

As you would expect, the AI trade in the market was hammered on Monday.

Major AI stocks from Micron (Nasdaq: MU) to Lumentum (Nasdaq: LITE), AMD (Nasdaq: AMD) to Intel (Nasdaq: INTC), got their backsides handed to them, with several falling around 5% or more.

The reason?

The doomer-speak from the frontier AI overlords – Amodei, Altman, and Musk.

However, all is not lost.

Meta’s (Nasdaq: META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, pushed back and said AI needed to go faster. Meta stock was up 2% for the day, completely bucking the trend.

Also on Monday, Jensen Huang fortuitously happened to be onstage at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles when, mid-panel, he got a call from… President Donald Trump.

Jensen then put him on speakerphone.

It’s quite hilarious, because Trump wasn’t having any of the doomer nonsense from the weekend, and neither was Huang.

“The robots are not going to take over the world...” Trump said to the crowd. He then continued to say how US$20 trillion of capital was coming, and that the fear AI would destroy us all was a “hoax!”

The doomers are playing right into China’s hands.

Huang’s reply was equally stoic.

He replied by saying, “we’re not going to let that happen” referring to China taking control of the AI race and the AI buildout heading offshore.

Jensen also made a point of saying, “we’re going to make sure that everybody wins in the AI race in America, every industry, every company, every state, every people.“

Alex Karp, CEO at Palantir (Nasdaq: PLTR) hasn’t needed to say anything new. He’s on record years ago saying about AI, “many of the people asking for a pause, are asking for a pause because they have no product.”

Not much has changed since he said that three years ago, has it?

Even back in 2023, there were calls for an AI “pause,” with warnings that it was going to destroy the middle class, and that white-collar jobs would suffer a “jobspocalypse”.

Well… has it?

For what it’s worth, Palantir closed Monday at US$173.31, up 3.6%.

Huang, after the President’s call, also remarked that someone needs to take accountability for all the times these ridiculous doomer calls about AI have been wrong.

No one does, though.

And all this fear that is suddenly getting mainlined into the market is going to be wrong again.

But is it odd that the loudest calls for a slowdown suddenly come from the two private labs heading for the biggest IPOs in history?

Yes, a bit.

Also, the timing, heading into a midterm election in the US, seems a little conveniently coincidental.

OpenAI is now saying the IPO is off, and that all this is playing a big part in their decision to hold off. Or are they just hiding behind the fear as a smokescreen?

Maybe the models aren’t where OpenAI wants them.

Or maybe, it’s actively more worried about China delivering as good as – or better – frontier models at a fraction of the token cost?

Fear might be real, but it might be more about fear for its position in the market than fear that AI is going to kill humanity.

One ticket to doomerville

What you can’t ignore is that, when this kind of fear rhetoric strikes the market, investors take a big hit.

At least in the short term.

But what’s also great about all this is that it creates great buying moments when great stocks that are coiled like a spring to explode higher, get sold off because Dario said let’s pause and Altman and Musk agreed.

Nothing wrong with the companies, just trading on market sentiment in the wrong direction.

What’s also great is that, as an investor, the solution to navigating moments like this can be in using the very technology these frontier labs are saying we should pause.

Using AI tools that we have at our disposal, we are looking at the market every day and getting opportunities put in front of us every week.

That’s why I built my Hyperion AI engine – to ensure that when peak fear hits the market, we’re not standing still…

We’re not crippled and paralysed by fear. Instead, we’re slashing through the noise and nonsense to see what opportunities are still there in the market.

It was built exactly for moments like this, and I’m loving right now what it’s able to show us.

Biotech and genomics, commodities and resources, digital assets, defence… opportunities in all forward-looking sectors.

Companies on the move… with that coiled upside potential.

AI is not a tool to be feared, but one to embrace, use, and collaborate with.

It will redefine how we work, where we work, why we work, and it will create entirely new kinds of opportunities, and bring all new kinds of ideas to life.

So, you can bunker down with the AI doomers.  They’ve just handed you a golden ticket to Doomerville.

Or you can sit with the other side, reinforced by Jensen Huang, Alex Karp, Mark Zuckerberg, and plenty of others who say it’s overblown and fundamentally wrong.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, Elon’s “agreement” lasted all of about 24 hours.

On Monday, when asked how close Grok 4.8 would be to achieving AGI (artificial general intelligence, the level that matches and surpasses humanity) Elon said, it would be Grok 5.

Doesn’t seem like he’s slowing down any time soon?

Until next time,

Sam Volkering
Investment Director, Southbank Investment Research