Nvidia's Jensen Huang takes on the hype: AI is not a nuke and it won't take all the jobs

By Steve Goldstein

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says AI capabilities are not like those of a nuclear bomb.

Is artificial intelligence so powerful that it needs to be carefully guarded? Is it so strong that it's about to take everyone's jobs?

Of all people to push back on that concept, it's Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who in an interview lamented U.S. chip export restrictions on sales to China. But in doing so, the head of the company that spearheaded the AI revolution suggested it is not on the cusp of some sort of superintelligence.

"If we scare this country into thinking that AI is somehow a nuclear bomb, so that everybody hates AI and everybody's afraid of AI, I don't know how you're helping the United States. You're doing it a disservice," he told the podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, as he also brushed back Patel's attempt to compare AI to enriched uranium.

"If we scare everybody out of doing software engineering jobs because it's going to kill every software engineering job-and we don't have any software engineers as a result of that-we're doing a disservice to the United States," he said.

Software companies IGV have seen their stocks hit hard by fears of AI disruption, a notion that Huang also has pushed back against in previous interviews.

Patel asked Huang about the capabilities of AI, including the Mythos version of Anthropic's AI tools, which isn't being released yet due to its cyber-offensive capabilities.

"Mythos was trained on fairly mundane capacity, and a fairly mundane amount of it. By an extraordinary company," replied Huang. "The amount of capacity and the type of compute it was trained on is abundantly available in China. So you just have to first realize that chips exist in China."

Huang also pointed out what while China is trailing in chip capacity, it is ahead of the U.S. in energy availability, so that it could link older chips together to get the same results as having more advanced semiconductors.

Nvidia (NVDA) shares rose 0.4% in premarket trade, following 11 straight days of gains.

Read: Nvidia's stock seals its longest winning streak ever. Is the momentum for real?

-Steve Goldstein

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04-16-26 0620ET