The most valuable company in the world welcomes you to its conference with ‘Veggie-Tales’-Adjacent Slop

A simple phrase that has stuck with me since I read it in 2010 was “power without prestige.” Was used in a discarded way by Franklin Foer of the New Republic in a column about the United States desperately trying to win the 2022 World Cup, but being defeated by Qatar. No one could question America’s wealth and military might, but what about intangible qualities like dignity?

I thought of that phrase when I saw the end of Jensen Huang’s 2026 keynote, the centerpiece of the first day of Nvidia’s GTC conference, in which he announced that his 5 billion dollar company intends to raise $1 billion in revenue only in the next two calendar years. Huang then capped off with a Veggie Tales-adjacent animated song starring a cartoonish version of himself at a campfire with a lobster and several robots, including the 1 Neo cleaning robot that needs to be controlled remotely.

And I’m sorry to tell you that now you must see it:

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against creepy things that are supposed to be cute. The self-contained animatronic Olaf from the Frozen films that Huang interacts with just before the animation plays, part of Disney. previously announced push toward highly sophisticated interactive robots for its parks-is sick, and I don’t have anything negative to say about it, except what it’s used as a transition to: an indie folk song. mixed with the Simpsons Canyonero jinglebeing wrongly treated as an acoustic campfire song because there was no one with discernment behind the scenes to keep this project going.

The song appears to have been created with an AI music generator like Suno or Udio, but Nvidia has not made public how this music came about. The company has created open source tools related to AI animation and music analysis, but they didn’t respond when I asked what was used to generate this particular song, so anything is possible. It could even have been performed by some anonymous singer, however unlikely. But since the point is that AI is an all-powerful economic giant, a human musician would be off the mark.

Conceptually, this is supposed to be a musical summary, so I guess it’s not a total mistake that the song Nvidia ended up with has a sort of “We Did’t Start the Fire” style bulleted song structure, although it’s not much of a structure, because there are little instrumental breaks instead of a chorus. But Nvidia just lets this song keep spreading and spreading, and then made a crowd full of journalists, investors, entrepreneurs and enthusiasts sit and listen to every agonizing second in person, along with anyone watching the broadcast from home and not muting their laptop speakers.

The low point is “AI Factories”, the verse at 2:17:12:

AI factories once took years.

Salesmen pulling racks and gears.

Built slowly, piece by piece.

There is no clear way to scale this beast.

DSX and Dynamo know what to do.

Convert power into income.

Lyrically speaking, this is no big deal. It’s the kind of familiar LLM nonsense 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 crazy with those last two non-scanning lines, so for some reason it switches to a tour-de-force record, generating audio in which the singer sings the words like a sensitive college student singing “Wagon Wheel” at 3 a.m., except the words are “Turning Power Into Income.”

Tech corporations take wrong turns with their marketing all the time, and this unsettling trip into the uncanny valley doesn’t even have a coherent enough idea at its core to draw the ire of something like Apple “Crush” announcement from 2024, in which an iPad crushes the tools of human creativity into oblivion. Take that, piano! But Apple internal marketing department He worked hard to make something so bad, while it appears little to no thought was put into Nvidia’s campfire video.

But the really fast quality of this video, by contrast, is insidious in a different way than “Crush.” Huang and his friend Olaf could have bowed and said goodbye, but in the age of AI, an inside joke can, in theory, become a fully executed opening bonus ending. The obvious subtext here is that this loose idea of ​​a campfire song didn’t require much effort. Productivity is the goal of everything Huang is doing in making the chips that drive the AI ​​economy: spending less time, but making more things.

But the global economy revolves around this company and there is supposed to be 30,000 people at this conference. Everyone who attended the keynote speech, which lasted two hours and 20 minutes, was subjected to this song. before Huang shouted “Alright, have a great GTC” and finally let them out of the auditorium.

Nvidia, like the United States itself, is a hegemonic power that seeks not to be intimidated by china competition. Right now, he certainly has the reins of power, but keeping your allies long-term is tough. Years from now, conference attendees probably won’t remember this bottom-of-the-garbage garbage fed to them by what is currently the richest company in the world, but who knows? The prestige could come in handy at some point when Nvidia’s power is no longer unquestionable.