Chapel Hill (North Carolina): Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has rejected fears that artificial intelligence will eliminate employment, arguing that the technology will automate tasks while allowing people and companies to pursue far greater ambitions.
“The idea that somehow all the jobs are going to be eliminated, removed, that’s just nonsense,” Huang said during a fireside chat with US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
Huang said jobs were defined by their purpose, context and meaning, even though some of the skills used to perform them would change.
“Those skills are gonna be automated by AI. The tasks are gonna be automated, but our jobs purpose remain,” he said. “And so I think what’s gonna happen was that we’re all just gonna be supercharged.”
Huang said Nvidia already uses AI throughout its operations, combining readily available products with systems developed internally.
“You should use AI off-the-shelf wherever you can, but don’t forget, you have to invest in building your own intelligence, every country, every company,” he said. “You can’t outsource all of your intelligence to somebody else.”
Huang predicted that the world could achieve what is commonly called artificial general intelligence within the next few years. He argued that elements of it had effectively arrived already, but cautioned that such a breakthrough would not automatically solve every company’s problems.
“It’s not as if all of a sudden in two years time, I say, okay, let me connect it to this AI service and I just sit back and all of a sudden my company becomes more and more productive overnight,” he said. “That’s just not gonna happen at all.”
Companies would still need to provide AI systems with purpose, context, relevant information and access to the tools required for productive work, Huang said.
He described AI as a “five-layer cake” comprising energy, chips, infrastructure, models, and data and applications. Countries did not need to dominate every layer, he said, but should determine where to invest and encourage AI adoption across education, healthcare, manufacturing and science.
“Every single country needs to build infrastructure so that you could support your own local economy,” Huang said. “It becomes the capacity, the intellectual capacity, the digital intellectual capacity for you to support your researchers and students and society and industries and startups.”
The Nvidia chief said the United States was expected to invest close to $1 trillion in AI infrastructure this year, generating economic growth and hundreds of thousands of jobs across semiconductor fabrication, computer production and AI data centres.
Huang urged governments to balance discussions about AI safety with its potential contribution to prosperity. The greatest risk for a country, he said, was failing to adopt the technology.
“The worst outcome is that you don’t take advantage of it. that you are left behind. That is the single worst outcome,” he said.
He also called for regulation to address demonstrated risks rather than speculative threats.
“Don’t regulate hypothetical, theoretical harm. Regulate actual and pragmatic harm,” Huang said.
Lutnick said countries would need to invest in data centres and domestic AI infrastructure to ensure their citizens and economies benefited from the technology.
“They’ve got to harness the AI for themselves,” Lutnick said. “Because what you’ve said is that education has been democratized.”
Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. Its graphics processing units, initially closely associated with computer gaming, have become central to the data centres used to train and operate advanced artificial intelligence systems.
(IANS)
