Florida Governor Ron DeSantis took a dig at Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang for referring to data centers as “superintelligence factories”
In a post on Wednesday, the Governor said, “Superintelligence factories = surveillance centers.”
DeSantis Challenges Flock Surveillance Use
The Governor’s comment comes amid his ongoing opposition to the use of Flock cameras. In September, Florida officials ordered local police to remove automated license plate readers from state roads, limiting the use of technology provided by private surveillance firms such as Flock Safety, the deadline for which was Wednesday, Fox Business reported.
DeSantis raised concerns about data collection, potential misuse, and the lack of oversight, warning against the growth of a "digital AI surveillance state."
A hardware and software analysis of Flock surveillance cameras found that the system can capture dozens of images per vehicle encounter. The cameras transmit data via cellular networks, while license plate and vehicle analysis appears to occur on Flock’s servers rather than on the cameras.
President Donald Trump backed the use of Flock cameras and told reporters, “I sort of like ’em because of that, because of law enforcement. But some people don’t. They think it’s an infringement.”
The Rebranding of AI
DeSantis’ post also comes in the wake of Huang’s statement that data centers are evolving into “superintelligence factories.”
“We call them data centers because that’s where we hold data. But the things that we’re building now, these are really super intelligence factories. And the reason why it’s a factory is because you’re producing something of economic value,” Huang said during a panel discussion alongside Elon Musk at the launch of the America.gov portal earlier this week.
On Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order directing the federal government to replace the terms "Artificial Intelligence" and "AI" with "Super Intelligence" or "SI" in official communications, policy documents and other non-statutory materials. Trump also released the White House Accord on Super Intelligence, which calls for independent audits, stronger internal controls and board oversight of advanced AI systems.
The pact was signed by Trump and leading technology executives, including Huang, Anthropic‘s CEO Dario Amodei, and Space Exploration Technologies Corp.‘s (NASDAQ: SPCX) CEO Elon Musk.
Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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