Jacopo Pantaleoni joined Nvidia in 2001 when the company had less than 500 employees. He worked on what was then a small research project to improve Nvidia’s graphics processing units so they could better render images on computers and gaming consoles.
More than two decades later, Nvidia has more than 26,000 employees and its GPUs are at the center of the generative AI explosion. Pantaleoni had climbed the ranks to become a principal engineer and research scientist, the second highest position for an individual contributor, he says. Then, in July, as Nvidia boomed like no other company, Pantaleoni says he resigned, giving up a substantial amount of unvested stock units, after coming to a realization.
“This market of machine learning, artificial intelligence” is “almost entirely driven by the big players—Googles, Amazons, Metas”—that have the “enormous amounts of data and enormous amounts of capital” to develop AI at scale. Those companies are also Nvidia’s biggest customers. “This was not the world I wanted to help build,” he said.
Now the Germany and Italy-based researcher is dedicating his career to studying the unintended societal impacts of AI, including publishing a book on the topic this month. Its premise: The concentration of power in the hands of tech giants like Google is the real danger of AI, not the human-killing-AI future being propagated in the press. He’s also reaching out to regulators to encourage them to limit the power of these big companies and lift underfunded research groups and startups.
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