I thought of that phrase as I watched 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 trillion company intends to generate $1 trillion in revenue over the next two calendar years alone. Huang then finished it off with a VeggieTales-adjacent animated singalong featuring a cartoony CGI version of himself at a campfire with a lobster and several robots, including a 1x Neo house-cleaning robot that had to be controlled remotely.
And I’m sorry to say that now you must see it:
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind scary things that are supposed to be beautiful. The autonomous animatronic of Olaf from the Frozen films, with whom Huang interacts just before playing the animation – part of Disney’s previously announced effort toward highly sophisticated interactive robots for its parks – Sick, And I don’t have anything negative to say about it, except that it’s used as a transition: a stomp-clap-hey indie folk song mixed with the Simpsons’ Canyonero jingle that’s being mistakenly treated like an acoustic campfire song because there was no one sane behind the scenes to keep this project on track.
This song appears to have been created with an AI music generator like Suno or Udio, but Nvidia hasn’t publicized how this music came to be. The company has created open source tools related to animation and AI music analysis, but when I asked them what was used to create this particular song, they didn’t answer, so anything is possible. It could also have been performed by an anonymous singer, this is highly unlikely. But since the theme is that AI is an almighty economic juggernaut, a human musician would be off-brand.
Conceptually, it’s supposed to be a musical recap, so I guess it’s not entirely a mistake that the song Nvidia ended up with has a kind of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” style, bullet point song structure – though it’s not much of a structure, as it has short instrumental breaks rather than choruses. But Nvidia let this song spread, and spread, and then they forced a crowd full of journalists, investors, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts to sit down and listen to every sad moment of it in person, along with anyone watching the stream from home who failed to mute their laptop speakers.
The bottom point is “AI Factories”, at verse 2:17:12:
AI factories once took years.
Vendors are hauling racks and gear.
Built slowly, piece by piece.
There is no obvious way to mount this animal.
DSX and Dynamo know what to do.
Converting electricity into revenue.
To put it sarcastically, it’s no big deal. This is the kind of familiar LLM doggerel we were trained to expect during the ChatGPTT frenzy in 2023. But musically, it’s torture. It seems the audio generator has malfunctioned on those last two lines that don’t scan, so for some reason it shifts into a tour-de-force register, producing audio in which the singer utters the words like a maudlin college student singing “Wagon Wheel” at 3 in the morning, except the words are “converting power into revenue.”
Tech corporations take wrong turns in their marketing all the time, and the idea at the center of this unsettling trip to the uncanny valley isn’t even a coherent enough idea to provoke the ire of something like Apple’s “Crush” ad from 2024, in which an iPad crushes the instruments of human creativity into oblivion — take that, Piano! But Apple’s in-house marketing department worked hard to create something so bad, whereas it feels like no thought was put into the Nvidia campfire video at all.
But the real-quick quality of this video, on the contrary, is lethal in a different way than “Crush.” Huang and his friend Olaf could bow out and say goodbye, but in the AI age, an inside joke can, theoretically, turn into a perfectly executed bonus keynote closing. What’s clear here is that not much effort went into this half-baked campfire song idea. The whole point of what Huang is doing by creating the chips that power the AI economy is productivity – spending less time, but making more stuff.
But the global economy revolves around this company, and the conference is expected to draw 30,000 people. Everyone who attended the two-hour and 20-minute long keynote address was treated to this song First Huang shouted “Okay, have a great GTC” and finally let them out of the auditorium.
Nvidia, like the US itself, is a hegemon pretending not to be afraid of competition from China. Right now, it unquestionably holds the reins of power, but it is finding it difficult to retain its allies in the long run. In a few years, conference attendees probably won’t remember this crumb from the bottom of the sloppy bucket that was fed to them by the richest company in the world at the moment, but who knows? Reputation may come in handy when Nvidia’s power is no longer unquestioned.
<a href