King Charles approached one of the world’s richest men, saying, “I need to talk to you”, as he presented the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (QEPrize).
Described as the “Nobel Prize” of the industry, the King delivered the award to seven people who have innovated modern machine learning.
Charles approached Jensen Huang, the founder and chief executive of the world’s most valuable company, Nvidia, who was one of seven receiving trophies from the King.
Mr Huang stated that the King approached him at St James’ Palace, saying he needed to talk to him.
The King presented the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering
|
PA
The King then handed the multi-billionaire a message he had delivered to the 2023 AI safety summit at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire.
Mr Huang told reporters: “The King, surprisingly, reminded me that he wanted to talk to me the last time I was here doing the state dinner, and there was something that he wanted to talk to me about.
“And as I saw him today, the first thing he said (was) ‘I need to talk to you’.
“And as he came up to me, he said: ‘there’s something I want to talk to you (about)’ and he handed me a letter, and this is a speech on AI safety.”
The King approached multi-billionaire Jensen Huang
|
PA
The Nvidia founder explained that Charles “cares about AI safety” and holds a keen interest in the topic.
He continued: “He believes in the power of the technology, the incredible capability to revolutionise the UK and the world, but he also wants to remind us that the technology could be used for good and for evil, and so to make sure that we do everything we can to advance AI safety as we advance AI for good.”
Other recipients of the award included Chinese-American computer scientist Professor Fei-Fei Li, who worked on “teaching computers to see”.
After receiving her award, Prof Li told reporters that she had briefly spoken with Charles about ensuring that technology is “doing good for people, and (making) sure we’re aware of the risks”.
The King approached Mr Huang saying he needed to talk to him
|
PA
She said: “He’s such a friendly person, and he’s obviously aware of this technology and aware of its human impact.
“AI is a very powerful technology – as all powerful technologies are, they’re a double-edged sword.
“I think it’s important that we recognise how much benefit it potentially has for healthcare, education, manufacturing and many things.
“But also, there are risks: Jobs will be shifting, it will impact different industries in very different ways, whether it’s from deep fakes to its ability to make decisions.”
The award was presented to seven individuals
|
PA
The professor emigrated from China at the age of 15 and has always held a fascination with science.
She majored in physics at Princeton University and had a “defining moment” when she shifted her interests towards the science of intelligence.
The other QEPrize 2025 winners included professors John Hopfield, Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, and Meta’s chief scientist, Yann LeCun.
They were honoured for their work in transforming computing systems inspired by the human brain into machine learning models.