There has been plenty of concern around how AI could disrupt many jobs, but NVIDIA says that at least at the company, it’s helping create jobs instead of taking them away.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang says that AI is helping create new jobs at NVIDIA. “We use AI across a whole company,” he said in an interview. “Every single software engineer today uses AI — not one left behind. A hundred percent of our chip designers use AI. We are busier than ever. And the reason for that is because we have so many ideas that we wanna go pursue. AI makes it possible for us to go pursue those ideas now that we’re not doing the mundane stuff,” he added.
Huang says that the time freed up by AI from doing mundane stuff was being used by employees to create better products and services for their customers. “And so I think the first idea is the more productive you are as a company, so long as you have more ideas. You could pursue those ideas, you’ll go after those ideas. And I think that AI in my case is creating jobs. It causes us to be able to create things that other people, customers would like to buy,” Huang explained.
“AI drives more growth. It drives more jobs. You know, all that goes together,” he added.
It’s a persuasive argument. AI can indeed make employees several times more productive, and they can then use their freed up time to create newer products, or make the existing ones better. NVIDIA’s example can serve as a great template for how AI can supercharge the most efficient companies.
But not every company in the world is as efficient as NVIDIA. NVIDIA currently is the most valuable company in the world, and by all accounts, is exceedingly well-run. Other companies, which are slower to adopt AI, could end up falling behind, and their employees could lose jobs. Also, there might be a ceiling to how much productivity the world needs — the global population is now falling, and humans only have 16 or so waking hours in the day when they can avail of products and services. And while some companies might end up becoming super productive, it remains to be seen if there will be enough valuable jobs to go around for all people after the entire workforce ends up being supercharged with AI.