NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang stays in the limelight because of his firm and his statements. Yet again, speaking at Y Combinator’s Startup School, he said that the people forecasting a white-collar bloodbath keep using two words interchangeably that mean very different things.
A task is one thing you do. A job is a purpose you serve, and it holds dozens of tasks inside it. AI is extremely good at swallowing the first. It has shown almost no ability to swallow the second.
Huang said, ‘The narrative of AI destroying jobs is exactly backward,’ while predicting that every role will change and a fresh batch of roles will appear alongside.
This statement by the NVIDIA CEO could be dubbed a direct shot at the most quoted AI prediction of the last one and a half years, where Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, said that AI could erase half of the white collar entry level jobs.
He also gave an example to support his statement by saying that a customer service worker who takes a complaint and read back an answer from a database will definitely lose their job because that can be automated. However, the same cannot be done in the case of radiology, as Machines read scans now, the one task that was supposed to end the profession.
Radiologist hiring kept rising anyway, and the reason given by Huang is patient backlog, due to which hospitals are supposed to clear the scans faster and admit the people. In a similar way, coders now invest less time in writing code and more in directing tools like Codex and Claude Code.
That’s not it; many a time NVIDIA CEO has mentioned that the AI firm leaders should stop scaring people with statement that look like they came out of science fiction. AI is evolving at a very fast pace, and there is no denying that. It will be intriguing to see how this race pans out in the next couple of years and what impact it will have on jobs.
