A simple turn of phrase that has stuck with me since I read it in 2010 was “power without prestige.” It was used in a tossed off way by the New Republic’s Franklin Foer in a column about the US trying desperately to land the 2022 World Cup, but getting beaten by Qatar. No one could question U.S. wealth and military might, but what about intangible qualities like, say, dignity?
I thought about that phrase when I watched the end of Jensen Huang’s 2026 keynote, the centerpiece of day one of Nvidia’s GTC conference, in which he announced that his $5 trillion company intends to rake in $1 trillion in revenue over the next two calendar years alone. Then Huang capped it off with a Veggie Tales-adjacent animated singalong starring a cartoony CGI version of himself at a campfire with a lobster and several robots, including the 1x Neo house-cleaning robot that has to be remotely controlled.
And I’m sorry to say you must now watch it:
Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against eerie things that are supposed to be cute. The autonomous animatronic of Olaf from the Frozen movies that Huang interacts with just before playing the animation—part of Disney’s previously announced push toward highly sophisticated interactive robots for its parks—is sick, and I have nothing negative to say about it, except what it’s used as a transition to: a stomp-clap-hey indie folk song mixed with the Canyonero jingle from the Simpsons, being mistakenly treated like an acoustic campfire song because no one with any discernment was there behind the scenes to keep this project on track.
The song seems to have been made with an AI music generator like Suno or Udio, but Nvidia hasn’t publicized how this music came about. The company has created open source tools related to animation and AI music analysis, but they didn’t respond when I asked them what was used to generate this particular song, so anything is possible. It could have even been performed by some anonymous singer, as unlikely as that is. But since the topic is AI being an all-powerful economic juggernaut, a human musician would be off-brand.
Conceptually, this is supposed to be a musical recap, so I suppose it’s not a total mistake that the song Nvidia ended up with has a sort of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”-style, bullet point song structure—though it’s not much of a structure, because there are little instrumental breaks instead of a chorus. But Nvidia just lets this song keep stretching out, and stretching out, and then they made a crowd full of journalists, investors, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts sit and listen to every agonizing second of it in person, along with anyone watching the stream from home who failed to mute their laptop speakers.
The low point is “AI Factories,” the verse at 2:17:12:
AI factories once took years.
Vendors pulling racks and gears.
Built up slowly, piece by piece.
No clear way to scale this beast.
DSX and Dynamo know what to do.
Turning power into revenue.
Lyrically speaking, this is no big deal. It’s the kind of familiar LLM doggerel we were trained to expect during ChatGPT mania back in 2023. But in musical form, this is torture. The audio generator seems to have gone haywire over those last two lines that do not scan, so for some reason it shifts into a tour-de-force register, generating audio in which the singer belts the words like a maudlin college student singing “Wagon Wheel” at 3 a.m., except the words are “Turning power into revenue.”
Tech corporations take wrong turns with their marketing all the time, and this disquieting trip into the uncanny valley doesn’t even have enough of a coherent idea at its center to provoke the rage of something like Apple’s “Crush” ad from 2024, in which an iPad squashes the tools of human creativity into oblivion—take that, piano! But Apple’s in-house marketing department worked hard to make something that bad, whereas it looks like little to no thought at all was put into the Nvidia campfire video.
But the thrown-together-real-quick quality of this video, by contrast, is insidious in a different way than “Crush.” Huang and his friend Olaf could have taken their bows and said goodbye, but in the AI era, an inside joke can, in theory, turn into a fully executed bonus keynote finale. The glaring subtext here is that this undercooked campfire song idea didn’t take much effort. Productivity is the whole point of everything Huang is doing by making the chips that are powering the AI economy—spending less time, but making more stuff.
But the global economy revolves around this company, and there are supposed to be 30,000 people at this conference. Everyone who attended the centerpiece keynote—which was two hours and 20 minutes long—was subjected to this song before Huang yelled “Alright, have a great GTC,” and at last let them file out of the auditorium.
Nvidia, like the U.S. itself, is a hegemon pretending to not be intimidated by competition from China. Right now, it unquestionably holds the reins of power, but holding onto your allies for the long haul is tricky. In a few years, conference attendees probably won’t remember this crud from the bottom of the slop bucket, fed to them by what for the moment is the richest company in the world, but who knows? Prestige might come in handy sometime down the line when Nvidia’s power is no longer unquestionable.
Source: gizmodo.com
