18 Quotes that Defined 2025: Andrej Karpathy, Sam Altman & Pope Leo XIV on AI
'What we are dealing with is a real and mysterious creature, not a simple and predictable machine.'
It was a year of sycophancy and slop.
This year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called Trump “America’s unique advantage,” and then a few months later Huang got an early Christmas gift — permission to sell his AI chips in China.
In a more chaotically sycophantic vein, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff alienated his lefty friends by asking for the National Guard to come to San Francisco — only to reverse course a few days later.
Meanwhile, respected AI leader Andrej Karpathy threw cold water on the AI boom, calling some of the mania “slop.”
Fierce competition for the best foundation model consumed the big AI labs — and Google’s much-hyped release of Gemini 3 had everyone else playing defense.
Here are 18 quotes from CEOs, VCs & political leaders that captured the year AI took over the world:
1
“We stand now at the frontier of an AI industry that is hungry for reliable power and high-quality semiconductors. Yet, too many of our friends are deindustrializing on the one hand and chasing reliable power out of their nations and off their grids with the other. The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety. It will be won by building — from reliable power plants to the manufacturing facilities that can produce the chips of the future.”
— Vice President JD Vance, on the need for less AI regulation at the Paris AI Action Summit, February 11, 2025
2
“For some of these companies, for a lot of our customers, it will be existential kind of life-and-death decisions.”
— Ryan Petersen, on how President Trump’s tariffs will impact large retailers that rely on his logistics software at StrictlyVC in San Francisco, April 3, 2025
3
“Today, the church offers its trove of social teaching to respond to another industrial revolution and to innovations in the field of artificial intelligence that pose challenges to human dignity, justice, and labor.”
— Pope Leo XIV, in a speech to his cardinals two days after being sworn in. May 10, 2025
4
“I think it didn’t exist — I think it was a fiction, to some extent.”
— Jackie Reses, on the narrative that the Biden Administration was actively “debanking” institutions affiliated with cryptocurrencies at the Breaking the Bank summit, May 20, 2025
5
“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.”
— Elon Musk, on the Republicans’ budget bill which set off the public breakup between him and President Trump, May 27, 2025
6
“We’ve never seen anything like the user growth of ChatGPT, particularly outside the US, and it shows how the global dynamics of tech and distribution have changed.”
— Mary Meeker, on the findings from her annual trend report, May 30, 2025
7
“America’s unique advantage that no country could possibly have is President Trump.”
— Jensen Huang, on President Trump’s embrace of the AI industry at the “Winning the AI Race” summit in Washington D.C., July 23, 2025
8
“I left this tour with the distinct feeling that AI raises some of the same fundamental questions that nukes did. How should they be used? By whom? Under what rules? Only this time we are creating a technology that can become smarter than the humans who are designing it.”
— Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) speaking to the Council of Foreign Relations in New York, September 5, 2025
9
“Everything I do is recommended by ChatGPT and then I check with my doctors for safety — I always ask them if they disagree, and if they disagree with ChatGPT I ask another doctor.”
— Vinod Khosla, on how much he uses AI for personal health decisions at Deus Ex Medicina summit in San Francisco, September 9, 2025