15 Quotes That Defined 2024, From Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk & More
“I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering."
Between the rise of generative artificial intelligence and the tech elite's Trump embrace, Silicon Valley has set the cultural agenda this year.
We picked 15 quotes (and in one case, a tweet) from tech investors, founders, and other notables that captured this year in tech:
1
“I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering.”
— Jensen Huang, Stanford SIEPR Economic Summit, March 1, relating what motivated him as he built Nvidia into a global tech leader over three decades.
2
“The court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist.”
— U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, Aug. 5, delivering the most consequential antitrust verdict in the tech industry since the Microsoft case in the late 1990s.
3
“her”
— Sam Altman via X, May 13. The OpenAI CEO found himself in perilous waters after his post underscored how much the preview of ChatGPT voice mode sounded just a bit too much like Scarlett Johansson.
4
“Isn’t your brain just math? When a neuron fires, it sums up the synapses. That’s math too. You know, you shouldn’t be afraid of Hitler—it’s just math, right?”
— Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, on stage at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit, Nov. 20, answering the argument from Marc Andreessen that AI can’t be dangerous because it’s “just math.”
5
“I think we accepted other people’s view of some of the things that they were asserting that we were doing wrong, or were responsible for, that I don’t actually think we were.”
— Mark Zuckerberg, appearing live on the Acquired podcast, responding to a question about lessons learned from the criticisms of Facebook and Meta, Sept. 10.
6
“There are things founders can do that managers can’t, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is.”
— Paul Graham in his “Founder Mode” essay, Sept. 1.
7
“I historically have been one that would rage against Silicon Valley venture people — and I had all sorts of fantasies of using drone-enabled technology to exact revenge, especially targeted, in violation of all norms.”
— Palantir CEO Alex Karp, on stage at the Hill and Valley Forum in D.C., May 1.
8
“It would be profoundly un-American to use political power, to the degree that Elon has it, to hurt your competitors and advantage your own businesses.”
— Sam Altman on stage at the DealBook conference on Elon Musk’s newfound role in the Trump administration, suggesting his mortal AI rival wouldn’t dare use government power against him, Dec. 4.