The king discussed the risks of artificial intelligence (AI) with the Nvidia founder at an awards ceremony recognizing leaders in the field.
Mr Charles awarded the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize in Engineering (QEPrize), which has been likened to the industry’s ‘Nobel Prize’, to seven people who have revolutionized modern machine learning.
Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive of Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, was among those to receive a trophy from the king.
Professor Fei-Fei Li, a Chinese-American computer scientist who works on “teaching computers to see,” was the only woman among the winners.
Meanwhile, Andrew Garrad and Henrik Steedsdal were awarded the 2024 QEPrizes for driving the design, manufacture and deployment of the latest wind energy technologies.
The businessman, one of the world’s richest men, said the first thing Prince Charles said to Mr Hwang at the St James’s Palace event was “I want to talk to you.”
The King then handed out a message for the 2023 AI Safety Summit to be held at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire.
“To my surprise, the king reminded me that the last time I was here for a state dinner, he had something he wanted to tell me. There was something he wanted to tell me,” Huang told reporters.
“And when I met him today, the first thing he said was, ‘I want to talk to you.'”
He continued: “And[Charles]came up to me and said, ‘I want to talk to you about something,’ and handed me a letter. It was a speech about AI safety.”
“He clearly cares very much about the safety of AI. He believes in the power of technology, its incredible ability to revolutionize the UK and the world, but at the same time he wants to remind us that technology can be used for good or for evil. So he wants to make sure that we are doing everything we can to make AI safer while advancing it for the better.”
Asked if the king uses AI, Hwang said, “I will read the letter thoroughly,” before adding that he himself uses multiple AI software every day.
Huang said he uses the software for “second opinions,” getting an answer from one model and asking another to “critique it,” and advises everyone to do so.
During a discussion with some of the laureates, the king warned that “there are a lot of bad guys around.”
He added that the rate at which new technologies are emerging is “just so fast.”
After receiving the award, Professor Lee told reporters that he spoke briefly with Charles about the technology’s “positive effects on people and making sure they are aware of the risks”.
“He’s a very friendly guy and obviously aware of this technology and aware of the impact it has on humans,” she said.
The scientist continued: “AI is a very powerful technology, and like all powerful technologies, it is a double-edged sword.
“I think it’s important to realize how much benefit it potentially has for health care, education, manufacturing and many other things.
“But there are also risks. Employment will change and impact different industries in very different ways, from deepfakes to decision-making capabilities.”
The professor immigrated from China at the age of 15 and was always interested in science, especially physics.
She majored in physics at Princeton University and had a “defining moment” around the turn of the century when she shifted her interests to the science of intelligence.
Other winners of QEPrize 2025 include Professor John Hopfield, Professor Yoshua Bengio, Professor Jeffrey Hinton and Meta’s Chief Scientist Yann LeCun.
They were honored for their work in transforming computing systems inspired by the human brain into machine learning models.
Hwang and Dr. Bill Daly, Nvidia’s chief scientist, were recognized for their work developing a hardware platform that helps operate machine learning algorithms.
Dr. Lee received the trophy for establishing the importance of tracking algorithm progress and providing high-quality datasets to train algorithms.
The 2024 and 2025 trophies were designed by two young people who visited St James’s Palace from India after winning a trophy-making competition.
Previous QEPrizes winners include an engineer who worked on the internet in 2013 and an engineer who created the world’s strongest magnet in 2022.
