This week’s “Saturday Night Live” cold open was a who’s-who of the AI revolution.
Comedian John Mulaney kicked off the episode by playing a CIA officer conducting national security training for tech billionaires. Specifically, how to identify a spy.
Mulaney’s character is joined by Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel (James Austin Johnson), OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (Ben Marshall), Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei (Jane Wickline), Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Andrew Dismukes), and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk (Jeremy Culhane).
“America needs you to learn the difference between a woman who actually wants to have sex with you, and a woman who is clearly a spy,” Mulaney said. “You all saw how former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigned this week after he was caught having an affair with an alleged Chinese spy.”
Last Sunday, Nvidia’s board of directors said it would investigate whether Huang was the “target of a foreign intelligence effort” on the same day he admitted to an extramarital affair in a memo to staff. Huang resigned from his position days later.
On “Saturday Night Live,” Mulaney’s character empathized with the tech billionaires.
“Look, I can’t imagine how disorienting this has been for you. To go from these bug-eyed little weirdos to being gods,” Mulaney said. “Never in the history of our species have people as pale and as strange as you, A: survived, and B: been given all the world’s wealth and power.”
Mulaney asked the tech executives why someone “very beautiful” would be interested in them.
“Because I have a good personality and normal, human mannerisms?” Marshall’s Altman said.
Zuckerberg, played by Dismukes, guessed it’s because “she’s comforted by my Meta glasses recording her at all times.”
Wickline’s Amodei theorized it’s because “she’s using me… for my body.”
Mulaney then asked the group to pretend an attractive woman approached them at the bar and asked, “What are you working on?” Amodei and Zuckerberg weighed in.
“I would say, Madam, what a pleasure to see you this evening. May I interest you in an industry secret?” Amodei said. Zuckerberg said he would “assume that she wanted to sleep with the man who created the Metaverse, as all women do.”
Near the end, former ‘SNL’ cast member Bowen Yang returned as Huang. “It’s me. Jensen ‘hide your wife’ Huang,” Yang says as he joins the other tech billionaires. “Ladies, when you invite Jensen over, you know what’s about to go down. The S&P 500.”
He added, “That’s right. I’m into BDSM: Breakin’ da stock market.” Nvidia lost more than $500 billion in market value over the last week.
Yang’s Huang cautioned his fellow tech executives against being like him. “Remember, women don’t like guys like us. That’s how we became guys like us,” he said.
In real life, some Nvidia loyalists are hoping the board will reinstate Huang. Nvidia’s board of directors said it’s considering internal and external candidates for the permanent CEO position.
