Book: Nvidia CEO Called Anthropic Exec 'Bean Counter' at 2022 Dinner
A new book excerpt describes a tense May 2022 dinner between Jensen Huang and Dario Amodei, where Huang dismissed Anthropic's TPU pitch and no deal was struck.
An excerpt from Kevin Roose's upcoming book The AGI Chronicles describes a May 2022 dinner between Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei at the San Francisco restaurant Eight Tables. The meeting was arranged to discuss Anthropic's compute needs, according to the excerpt reported by tomshardware.com.
Before the dinner, Anthropic's chief compute officer Tom Brown showed Huang a spreadsheet arguing that Google's Tensor Processing Units were a better investment than Nvidia's chips. The book claims Huang called Brown a "bean counter," a characterization an Nvidia spokesperson denied.
The excerpt also alleges Huang repeatedly talked about building the world's biggest data center and kept repeating himself, leading Amodei to mutter that Huang was being "kind of Trump-like." No deal was struck at the dinner, but the companies later formed a partnership.
Anthropic now uses a mix of Nvidia and AMD GPUs and Google TPUs, and is co-designing its own custom inference chips. Amodei has since published an essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier" recommending slowing the pace of AI model improvement.
Huang has publicly disagreed with calls for pacing and regulation, saying companies should self-police and that companies releasing unsafe products should be shut down. The AGI Chronicles releases on Oct. 6.
Quick answers
What happened at the 2022 dinner between Jensen Huang and Dario Amodei?
According to an excerpt from Kevin Roose's book The AGI Chronicles, the May 2022 dinner at Eight Tables in San Francisco was arranged to discuss Anthropic's compute needs. No deal was struck, but the companies later formed a partnership.
Did Nvidia respond to the book's claims?
An Nvidia spokesperson denied the book's claim that Huang called Anthropic's Tom Brown a "bean counter."
When does The AGI Chronicles come out?
The AGI Chronicles releases on Oct. 6.