Jensen Huang didn’t appear to see the irony. “AI is the greatest technology equaliser of all time,” the boss of Nvidia told a panel of four men dressed almost identically in blue suits.
“Everybody is going to be augmented by AI. Everybody’s an artist now. Everybody’s an author now. Everybody’s a programmer now.”
Huang was speaking at an AI summit in Washington last week organised by The Hill and Valley Forum and the All-In business and technology podcast, hosted by its unapologetically all-male line up of four tech investors and entrepreneurs, including David Sacks, the White House AI and crypto tsar.
The event, where President Trump unveiled a low-regulation action plan for AI, was a celebratory occasion for Nvidia and the bosses of the big tech companies that are buying Nvidia chips in an effort to dominate in the race to develop the most advanced AI.
However, it was a strange sort of Utopia Huang was describing, one in which people will apparently outsource their work and creativity to language models that will define the cultural norm.
Judging by the people leading the development of and discourse around advanced AI in America, that normalisation is going to be predominantly defined by men.
Overall, female leaders are severely underrepresented in technology leadership roles in AI companies, holding 22 per cent of product, engineering and science roles, according to analysis by Russell Reynolds Associates, the leadership recruitment firm.
Meanwhile, women are more likely to have their jobs replaced by generative AI, and they have been slower to adopt AI technology into their work, according to the World Economic Forum.
• Bank of England: Bias embedded by AI threatens financial stability
Researchers have warned that AI models are using biased data that could lead to flawed outcomes in areas like healthcare, finance and law.
For all the long-term promise of AI, it is making the world more dangerous for women and children. So-called “nudifier” apps are using AI to create explicit deepfakes of women from ordinary photographs.
Campaigners and parents are raising the alarm about a lack of guardrails around chatbots that can interact with children. A mother from Florida is suing Character.AI, a start-up that allows anyone to create an AI character to interact with, over the suicide of her 14-year-old boy who killed himself after he fell for one of its bots.
Elon Musk has revealed new online companions via the Grok chatbot on X, his social media platform, which the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, a charity, described as perpetuating “sexual objectification of girls and women”.
There are signs of a gender divide in how the development of AI is being discussed. While male tech bosses have led calls for less red tape so the US can dominate in the global AI arms race, female tech leaders have advocated for a human-centric approach that promotes both innovation and has guardrails to prevent harm.
Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer at OpenAI, has previously said government regulators should be “very involved” in developing safety standards for advanced AI models.
Dr Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford University computer scientist who has been called the “godmother of AI”, said this year that AI policies should be grounded in “science, not science fiction” and should focus on the real-world challenges of the technology rather than on apocalyptic or Utopian fantasies.
Li co-authored a report for the Joint California Policy Working Group on AI Frontier Models in June that called for increased transparency from companies developing advanced models, suggesting they should be required to disclose publicly information about their safety tests, and risk assessments, citing the tobacco industry’s failure to disclose health risks to users.
There are many other trailblazing female tech leaders developing AI, including Daniela Amodei, president of Anthropic, and Lila Ibrahim, chief operating officer of Google Deepmind.
However, it is hard to ignore that women are underrepresented in the debate around the development of advanced AI, and that we should be worrying about it.