AI and the Tech Giants: What the CEOs Actually Said
Verbatim quotes from the leaders of the AI era — on artificial intelligence, data centres, jobs, and safety — each linked to its source.
“people should not cede control of the future to superintelligence, and that requirement should ultimately constrain AI progress”
“accelerating much higher than the company”
“drives a lot of efficiency”
“much more like a new Renaissance”
“take the hardest, most valuable problems”
“The people deserve to have their RAM too!”
“Iâm going to give them probably half of that on top of [their base pay] as tokens ... because every engineer that has access to tokens will be more productive”
“I would rather not make up a fake unit”
“spend meaningfully more in 2027.”
“As of the past few weeks, debt markets have almost entirely shut off access to money for any company that doesn't have substantial revenue independent of AI data centers.”
“We will still not have enough capacity to meet all the demand we have in 2026.”
“work is going to be optional”
“deflation will be the issue, not inflation”
“would be public and inevitably noted and commented upon by company employees”
“Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America”
“This will be the first of many”
“I recommend giving the shares directly to the public”
“This is what I will be doing”
“a risk to humanity as a whole”
“can basically fly like a rocket”
“a small percentage of ultimately what the company has to raise”
“in the world to be able to be a convener of many of these dialogues”
“real and effective safety standards”
“Grok @Bot can be your personal chief financial officer!”
“lose control of the future”
“I'm happy to stand up in front of the company and our investors and say, ‘I’m sorry,’”
“‘We told you all along this moment might happen. We’re still going to try to figure out a way to make you a bunch of money in the future, but we’ve got to make a decision that is extremely against your financial interest right now, and for the good of humanity, we’re going to do that.’”
“lighter-touch regulatory stance”
“I wouldn't take a trade of saying, 'We'll make sure there's no major hacks, there's no misuse of this technology, there's zero scams, there's zero all the other bad things that will happen,'”
“I disagree, but I understand the perspective of people who are like, 'This technology is going to get so powerful, and it's so dangerous, that a single lab in San Francisco should have it and make sure nothing bad happens, and kind of figure out how to dole out the benefits,'”
“a completely unacceptable tradeoff”
“sitting down at a computer”
“lion's share of capacity in 27”
“an investable infrastructure asset”
“works in the way that we intend”
“not been as fast as we would have liked”
“Imagine that somebody comes into your office and says, ‘I know we’re in a race to get out the next airplane first, but we’re worried that the airplane will crash and people will die.’ Would you say, ‘I need to win this race’?”
“some kind of industrywide coordination”
“an order of magnitude more Starlink V3 satellites”
“good old-fashioned engineering”
“FDA-cleared, over-the-counter hearing aid”
“We do continue to believe that climate remains one of the most important issues of this century, but we’re now asking, well, can we do it in the ways that we thought six years ago?”
“We Must Pace the Frontier”
“The Future Is for Everyone”
“capable of taking over the entire internet”
“an irrelevant marketing term”
“numerous ROI positive places”
“receiving a lot of offers for compute at a significant premium over what we paid for it”
“greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment”
“issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations”
“essentially seeding a new silicon species”
“no doubt compete with us for resources, no matter how much it cares about humanity and loves us”
“a meaningful premium over what we paid for the compute”
“the leading surface where people engage with Meta AI”
“a new silicon species, which will no doubt compete with us for resources”
“we’re essentially seeding a new silicon species”
“ongoing, employee-like access”
“full pacing, or even ‘pause,’”
“deserving of independent agency”
“other labs can just do this too”
“without sacrificing commercial advantage”
“When we talk about 'pacing,' we do not mean 'stopping.'”
“"For too long the industry lied" about AI risks”
“strong demand for our products continue to outpace our growing supply”
“a primary topic of discussions”
“can and should voluntarily work together to set standards”
“must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models”
“pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up”
“swarm of agents essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective”
“essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective”
“voluntarily work together to set standard”
“without sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States' lead in AI”
“very possibly be a trillion dollar annual revenue business for us in time”
“There are enormous opportunities for Apple moving forward in AI”
“I truly have never been more optimistic”
“we are close to creating a genie that can grant any wish”
“ChatGPT has woke programmed into its bones”
“AI will probably increase the global economy by 20 to 30%”
“customers’ forecasts point to our growth doubling next year”
“doing productive and useful work”
“This marks our largest-ever American manufacturing program commitment. It's also an important step forward in our work to build an end-to-end silicon supply chain here in the U.S.”
“about to cross $4 billion”
“Even though our demand is much greater than 70%, our supply allows us to confidently deliver 70%”
“seeing incredible demand for our AI and data products”
“The idea that now these things are in a meaningful sense better than I am is like: What the hell?”
“Self-regulation on the most dangerous tool ever invented?”
“AI is now doing productive and useful work”
“we made a chip and it is fast.”
“much greater than 70 per cent”
“one of the most turbulent times in human history”
“the greatest equaliser ever invented, or the worst source of injustice”
“slow the rush away from human labor”
“demand has gone parabolic”
“It's like saying, 'Should we meet to discuss taxation at this restaurant or this restaurant?'”
“Like, you know, ‘We should trade off a lot of liberty for safety.’”
“so dangerous and so misguided that we need to take a declarative position against it right now”
“the exact right amount of time”
“four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value”
“Partners there can help our clients by saying, ‘Look, people, you need an ROI. Let’s focus in on one, two, three things where we can scale the answer so that it makes a real difference across the enterprise,’”
“every model is substitutable”
“AI infrastructure spending is on track to reach 3 to 4 trillion annually by the end of this decade”
“if we basically did nothing”
“uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics”
“You want money for goods and services, right? You want money for obviously food, housing, transport, entertainment. Well, if that is so abundant that the robots and AI are providing more goods and services than any human could possibly consume, what do you need money for?”
“hundreds of millions of dollars”
“is a big part of who I am”
“AI revenue will exceed all other SpaceX revenue”
“I find it a pretty big turnoff when people in the tech industry [...] talk about building this ‘one true AI,’”
“Kudos to @JoshWoodward & the entire Gemini team, and thank you to everyone who has been on this journey with us – much more to come!”
“Given how dynamic and competitive the AI landscape is, I think it will be more productive to have a close proactive collaboration between frontier labs and the government rather than a rigid process and review timeline”
“liberty, open inquiry, free enterprise, and equal opportunity”
“slowing the pace of model innovation or meaningfully delaying individuals’ access to this technology”
“AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work”
“that just works out of the box and is easy enough for billions of people”
“a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water and people buy it from us on a meter”
“not think it is a good strategy to keep powerful models to a chosen few”
“memory output is increasing by around 20% per year”
“The person who sits next to you saying, like, âDo this, donât do this, that worked, you missed that thing,â or, âyouâre making these mistakes,â and âIâm just going to talk [to] you about this one,â”
“internal projections for reaching $1 trillion in revenue, not ARR, but revenue, have moved up from 2031 to 2030.”
“The memory output is increasing by around 20% per year. Now, normally, that would be fantastically fast and amazing for any large, mature industry, but ask yourself: Is the demand increasing by 20% a year?”
“The largest infrastructure build-out in human history”
“CPUs are just as important as GPUs”
“upgrade possibilities on iCloud+”
“We started calling the clouds. We started calling chip fabs. We started calling energy providers and everyone's like, 'You're totally crazy. This is impossible. No industry has ever moved like this. We've been around. There's these booms and busts. It's not going to go up in a straight line. This is reckless,'”
“Don’t imagine how hard it’s going to be and let all of that turn into anxiety and not doing something about it. You want to imagine in your head, ‘How hard can it be?’”
“an age of amazing abundance where anybody can have anything they can think of”
“the broadest functionality across both cloud core and AI”
“full-length movie of The Odyssey”
“clear line of sight to strong financial returns”
“making the necessary decisions required across our content portfolio, platform, and operations”
“We are making the necessary decisions required across our content portfolio, platform, and operations to reset the business for long-term growth. We have the best IP in the industry and talented studios around the world and believe we can bring these strengths together and expect to return the business to growth in fiscal 2027.”
“both consumer and commercial experiences”
“world-leading CPU supplier”
“universal ‘you can have whatever you want’ income”
“I am terrified of a world where the very real fears of AI are used as a way to say, 'Only this small group of people can have it because it's too dangerous,'”
“It's an 'and,' not an 'or.'”
“value will increasingly shift toward the orchestration and data layers”
“Now, the important thing is where is the return on investment for those investments? We are seeing the return on investments. I mean, the fact is, we are ramping our own AI usage within AMD very significantly month over month. And we're seeing the productivity come back in just better products, more capable products, faster time to market. And that will come out as you look at the long arc [of technology].”
“should be spending on capex as fast as we can – spend as fast as we can without it being too wasteful”
“And I would like to just admonish you and the media for the absurd characterization of the far right. It is false and misleading and nonsense!”
“You can't just wake up one morning and say, 'Oh, I want a gigawatt of compute tomorrow,'”
“did not anticipate the magnitude of the capex reprioritization”
“caught, contained & publicly disclosed an attack unlike anything we’ve seen before, and did it at record speed”
“applying a lot of our compute and effort in that direction”
“Chris Nolan [had] lost his integrity”
“performance, scale and choice”
“might be able to exceed Kimi”
“two forces are converging at the same time”
“If you use Fable, when it refuses for any random thing, it just is like, when was the last time you had a creation tool that was so editorially controlled?”
“gives us a bit more space to think through things in a slightly different way than if you’re in the wheelhouse the whole time”
“a reason to favor open-source harnesses”
“our custom silicon business is now one of the top three data center chip businesses in the world”
“save us tens of billions of dollars of CapEx each year and provide several hundred basis points of operating margin advantage”
“servers, storage, and memory purchases”
“state-of-the-art or very close to it”
“doing better than we expected”
“very grateful for all fidji has done for openai”
“land, power, buildings, chips, servers, and networking gear”
“many, many people in our organization are spending millions of dollars”
“not incredibly good at mobile devices”
“We are genuinely differentiated. We're unique in the market because of our vertically optimized AI stack”
“The incentive structure is broken. What fixes it?”
“a US-led international forum”
“were worried that we weren’t going to move fast enough to adapt”
“national security is first and foremost”
“there is no societal permission”
“is not a bad idea. I just don't like the idea of the government picking the customers”
“approving access customer by customer.”
“the computing pattern of the next decade”