Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been pushing back against the popular narrative that AI will wipe out huge swaths of the workforce, but he also placed some blame on overly confident CEOs who assume they know everything.
In an interview this week with the Special Competitive Studies Project, he said that while people warning about an AI apocalypse are trying to be helpful, such predictions will backfire.
“If we convinced all the young college graduates to not be software engineers, and it turns out the United States needs more software engineers than ever, that’s hurtful,” Huang explained. “So we have to be mindful of how we communicate the importance of this technology and what it’s able to do.”
That’s as the advent of AI agents has made coding accessible to a broader range of users while also allowing engineers to write much more code. Investors have sold shares of software companies, fearing enterprise customers will use AI to create their own platforms.
Although it’s important to advocate for guard rails on AI, he added that scaring people into believing that the technology will pose an existential threat to humanity, destroy democracy or eliminate 50% of entry-level jobs is “ridiculous.”
He didn’t name names, though Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has previously said AI could wipe out roughly 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs.
“They’re made by people who are like me, CEOs, and somehow because they became CEOs you adopt a God complex, and before you know it you know everything,” Huang said. “And so I think we have to be careful and really ground ourselves to talking about the facts.”
In reality, he estimated that AI has created more than half a million jobs in the last few years. That’s because when companies incorporate AI, they grow faster and hire more people.
And data from hiring site Indeed shows that demand for software engineers is actually increasing. Huang said this demonstrates the difference between a job’s task and its purpose, which often get conflated by AI doomsayers.
In software engineering, for example, the task is coding, but the purpose is innovation, problem-solving, connecting disparate ideas, and identifying new needs.
Another flaw in AI apocalypse arguments is that it assumes demand for coding is somehow fixed at 1 billion lines of code a day, according to Huang.
“We need a trillion lines of code written,” he said. “We need way more code written than that because we have the imagination of solving problems whether it’s in healthcare or science or in manufacturing and retail.”
The difference is that humans don’t have to sit at a keyboard anymore to write code and can instead use AI to do it.
That also speaks to the so-called Jevons paradox, which says that greater efficiency can dramatically boost consumption. Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok applied it to the AI age, predicting that AI adoption will beget more jobs, not fewer.
When the cost of professional work falls as AI makes tasks more efficient, the market for those tasks will actually expand. The total number of firms and workers in those fields—from law to accounting to consulting—will grow.
“When steam engines made coal more efficient, Britain didn’t burn less coal, it burned more,” Slok wrote in a recent note. “The same pattern is happening for cheaper legal services, consulting services and financial services.”
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