Jensen and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

Jensen Huang, the white-haired, 61-year-old, president, co-founder, and chief executive officer of Nvidia and chief apostle of artificial intelligence brought his unique sales pitch to the keynote stage at CES 2025 last evening. In the process, Huang, estimated to be the ninth wealthiest person in the world, posed the question: Can privacy and AI co-exist?

An overnight success 30 years in the making (check out Tae Kim's new biography "The Nvidia Way" for the details), Huang got in touch with his inner huckster persona - supremely familiar to past attendees of Nvidia GTC events - to sell CES attendees on the proposition that AI can solve virtually any problem facing mankind from factory automation to cancer. The message was powerful and made more so by Nvidia's current status at the nexus of all things AI and the fact that Huang had new hardware and software to pitch.

The news making at the keynote (according to Reuters) revolved around:

• AI tech for robot development
• New video/computer gaming chips/boards
• A desktop computer for computer programmers
• And a new relationship in the automotive industry with Toyota

Nvidia Unveils Robot Training Tech, New Gaming Chips and Toyota Deal - https://www.reuters.com/technology/ces-nvidia-ceo-set-take-stage-ces-just-after-shares-hit-record-high-2025-01-07/

The challenge for Huang is always anticipating the next big opportunity and capitalizing with next-level semiconductor and software solutions. Huang was able to wow the audience with examples of Nvidia gear at work enabling advanced gaming, automated driving, and robotics, but next-level opportunities can be hard to find when you're already perched at the top of the tech food chain.

If there are next-level opportunities to be found, Nvidia will find them. Nvidia vaulted to industry leadership on the strength of a pincer-like strategy built around the company's adoption of a graphics processing unit-based (GPU) business buttressed by the CUDA parallel computer platform and application programming interface. By sowing a massive cadre of CUDA developers within university programs around the world, Nvidia created an army of developers building general purpose solutions around Nvidia GPUs.

Computer gaming, robotaxis, and bitcoin mining may have contributed headlines to mark the milestones of Nvidia's early rise, but enterprise computing and data centers leveraging GPU processing to deliver artificial intelligence solutions call the tune and pay the bills today. It's not sexy, but it's big business and it is altering the contours of every industry and the daily technology interactions of every individual.

Much as Huang, the pitchman in chief, can never resist an opportunity to "show off" the actual physical products and chips behind the solutions that the company delivers, it's a much bigger challenge to pitch AI broadly, but that is precisely what Huang did. Huang put a happy face on AI for the thousands (millions?) of attendees watching his keynote in person or remotely.

In essence, the unspoken message was that AI makes everything better. No matter what activity or application you might conceive, AI will make it faster, more efficient, and more fun.

Of course, this overlooks the intrusiveness of AI technology that makes its presence known on a daily basis in facial scans, search results, insurance quotes, payment platforms, and social media. What if AI were to become the source of all the TERRIBLE things happening in our lives - identity theft, skyrocketing insurance rates, job discrimination, service discrimination.

My television talks to my computer as Google builds a profile of me, which probably differs from the profile Amazon is building, or the one that Microsoft and Apple are creating. Can we have some visibility to these profiles? Some control? Do we need to adopt the European model of GDPR so that we have the right to be erased?

Nowhere is this more evident than in the automotive industry where drivers and passengers are increasingly monitored and probed by sensors of every variety embedded in, on, and around vehicles intended to perform functions from avoiding collisions to recommending the next podcast or advertisement via the infotainment system.

Suppliers to the automotive industry have found themselves struggling with the challenge of anonymizing data or "fuzzing" location information in the interest of privacy preservation. To make all of this work will require a next-level consent management solution of the sort offered by AIden Automotive.

AIden is attending CES 2025 and talking up its new partnership with HAAS Alert, which is itself a location data sharing platform. The next step in HAAS Alert's journey is sharing safety critical location alerts live between cars on the road - such as broken down, crashed, or disabled vehicles in the roadway. In order to share this type of data, HAAS Alert rightly recognizes the need to obtain consent from the vehicle owner/driver.

In this way, in the car at least, consumers will gain an unambiguous process of data disclosure capable of functioning on a case by case basis - unlike the broad opt-in wording used by most new car dealers at the point of purchase - i.e. "We reserve the right to share your data with marketing partners and law enforcement... okay?" This kind of consent management is inadequate and annoying to consumers - particularly when auto makers turn around and sell vehicle data thereby collected to undisclosed third parties.

Jensen Huang called attention to his new sparkly looking coat on stage at CES 2025. It is indeed something of a dreamcoat offering to interpret and fulfill the dreams of consumers, entrepreneurs, medical professionals, law enforcement agencies, and governments. With proper consent management we can avoid those dreams becoming nightmares.