50 Cent used AI to put Jensen Huang in Snoop Dogg’s place in “P.I.M.P.”, then offered him a job running AI

The man who made the chips behind the AI boom has become the star of an AI-made rap video, and he did not get a say in it.

50 Cent posted an edited version of “P.I.M.P.” to Instagram on Thursday US time, with Jensen Huang digitally swapped in for Snoop Dogg, who joined 50, Lloyd Banks and Young Buck on the song’s 2003 remix. The caption was pure 50: “Jensen don’t sweat it come be head of AI at G-Unit film & television”, signed off with “GLG GreenLightGang in full effect”.

He was not done. A second clip dropped Huang into the “Popstar” video, the 2020 DJ Khaled and Drake single whose video starred Justin Bieber in the lead role. “lol like this I don’t know why, but I like it,” 50 wrote.

Why Huang, and why now?

Because nobody in business had a worse week. Huang resigned as Nvidia’s chief executive after reports of extramarital affairs, including one with a woman US authorities suspect of spying for China; President Donald Trump has said the FBI is investigating that relationship, and China has denied any involvement. Huang ran the company for 33 years and built it into the world’s most valuable chipmaker. Colette Kress, its chief financial officer, is running it in the interim.

The fallout has moved to Washington. The chair of the Senate Banking Committee wants Huang to testify on 3 December about advanced chips reaching China, and three House committees have asked him to appear on 1 and 2 December, all under threat of subpoena.

Is this a real job offer?

Only in the way 50 Cent’s posts are ever real. He has spent two decades turning other people’s worst moments into punchlines on his own feed. G-Unit Film & Television is real, though: it is the production company behind his run of crime dramas, led by the Power franchise, which made him one of hip-hop’s most successful television producers.

The joke also lands on a sore point. Edits like these, which put real people’s faces into footage they never filmed, are exactly the kind of AI output Huang’s chips made cheap and fast to produce. The likeness of the man who sold the shovels for the AI gold rush is now being used, without asking, by one of rap’s most practised trolls.

What does Snoop have to say?

Nothing so far. Snoop’s verse on the remix is one of the reasons “P.I.M.P.” remains a fixture on 2000s playlists, and the track is one of the best-known singles from 50 Cent’s 2003 debut, Get Rich or Die Tryin’. Snoop has not publicly responded to being replaced by a chip executive.

Why does it matter beyond the joke?

Rappers’ feeds have become one of the fastest ways a business scandal reaches people who never read the business pages. 50 Cent’s audience is one of the largest in hip-hop, which means plenty of people will have met the Nvidia story first through a remix. For Huang, whose public image for years was a leather jacket on a conference stage, it is a sign of how far the story has spread beyond the tech world.