Manus founder shares Jensen Huang's improvised Élysée Palace toast on software, AI and Europe
j_foerst · x · 2026-11-15
Four months after launching Manus, founder hidecloud attended a dinner hosted by President Macron at the Élysée Palace, seated across from Jensen Huang. Asked to give a toast on the spot, Huang delivered an improvised speech that the author transcribed:
- Software culture: chasing perfection kills companies — software is about shipping, shipping, shipping. European culture clashes with this obsession with polish.
- The toast line: "Like this wine. You age it. We Americans sold all the wine years ago."
- On beta and wabi-sabi: AI is an imperfect perfection — don't hunt for flaws or regulate it into paralysis; explore it instead of waiting for every compliance box to be ticked.
- Praise for France: the only country that can build AI in Europe, because it's the only one still building nuclear plants — energy is what makes data centers possible.
More from AGI Musings
- AI's real takeover isn't full control — it's calendar invites and quietly surrendered decisions — AryHHAry · 2026-11-15
- 'They trained on our knowledge and will sell it back to us, with errors, forever' — jgvfwstone · 2026-11-15
- 45 days talking to one personal AI agent: "minimum control, minimum friction" wins — perilli · 2026-11-15
- 12 lessons from Jensen Huang's YC interview: textbooks saved NVIDIA, AI kills tasks not jobs — tibo_maker · 2026-11-15
- Microsoft's 15-hour outage: why a senior engineer says AI won't replace programmers — amaarora · 2026-11-15
- Dev-turned-Ops argues Ops roles may be more resilient to AI agents than Dev jobs — cl3don · 2026-11-15