Generative AI has exploded onto the tech scene and right on into the portfolios of investors large and small.

Consider these stunning stats.

Nvidia (NVDA) — seen as the leader in the AI space due to its chips that power OpenAI's ChatGPT platform — just crossed a $1 trillion market cap this week for the first time. One year ago, the company's market cap was about $400 billion.

Led by founder Jensen Huang, Nvidia is weeks removed from a major guidance reset that stunned Wall Street. The reason? Voracious demand for chips that support large language models.

Meanwhile, the Defiance Quantum ETF (QTUM) — which counts Nvidia and OpenAI investor Microsoft (MSFT) as top holdings — has exploded 30% year to date. By comparison, the S&P 500 (^GSPC) is up 14%.

"We've seen a lot of exciting waves of technology in our industry — the cloud, social, mobile — but this AI wave is going be the biggest that anyone has ever seen," Salesforce co-founder, chairman, and CEO Marc Benioff said on Yahoo Finance Live this week.

Here's what three of the biggest thought leaders in tech, including Benioff, recently told Yahoo Finance Live about this generative AI moment.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on the societal risk from new AI:

"I think we realize that we're in a world now where AI is able to do things that we've only seen in movies. 'The Minority Report' was partly written by a Salesforce employee, Peter Schwartz, and I think we all remember that from our childhood. We didn't think it was going to be our present moment reality, but it's turning out to be more like 'The Minority Report' than not."

AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su on AI regulation:

"I do believe that we have to practice responsible AI. And I think all of us in the technology industry, you have to do that. I think there's a lot of good conversation and good dialogue around what that means. There will be some regulation. There should be some regulation. But I don't think we should forget that the power of the technology is so great that we need to really embrace it and take advantage of it while also practicing responsible AI."

Affirm founder and CEO Max Levchin on the long-term impact of AI:

"I'm not concerned about the job destruction, which I think there's plenty of naysayers sort of warning us all about how it's going to come and take your job. I think humans are going to be quite important in a lot of intellectual work for quite some time. And AI is going to be a great tool. It's a productivity enhancer, not a job eliminator. I do worry that we will find ourselves placing too much trust on systems that are not yet fully proofed for safety."

"The No. 1 worry I have about AI is not [that] AI infiltrates some important computer system and turns us all to paper clips. It's that some person asks a chatbot, 'Hey, give me some code that I can cut and paste into a compiler or an interpreter.' That code is faulty and actually causes real problems. And so inadvertent foolish errors are much more dangerous with AI of today's generation than any sort of maliciousness or evil AI overlords."

Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance's Executive Editor. Follow Sozzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn. Tips on the banking crisis? Email [email protected]

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