Nvidia's Huang: Don't mention the AI-pocalypse

Jensen Huang wants the world to stop fretting about AI and start building with it. At Nvidia's GTC event in Berlin, he dismissed predictions of human extinction, defended AI's job prospects, and pitched a $4,000 computer as the family robot. The Nvidia chief's relentless optimism occasionally gave way to irritation during a question-and-answer session. "If we don't describe a future worthy to be part of, then we're not going to lead people there," he said. "We have to describe a future worthy of creating. We have to describe a future not of fear, but of optimism. Who wants to create a future that's worse than today's? We don't have to work hard to create a future worse than today. We just let it happen, isn't that right?" Huang said that we still have to ask the hard questions about safety and jobs, but "it's important, of course, that we don't make it up. It is not helpful in describing an optimistic future when you say that it will be the end of the human civilization. First of all, it's not true. It's made up. I know it gets headlines," he said, dismissing such stories as clickbait. When asked if AI really makes people more productive, he explained that there are two ways to think about that: either it helps you do the same old thing more efficiently, or it helps you do things you couldn't before. "Most of engineering, most of design, has to do with exploring options. Try, experiment, try and experiment, iterate, experiment, iterate," he said. "What's the best combination? And you can only have so much time to try different versions. Now I have AI to go off and explore that universe. That is productivity. And inside our company, we do this every single day now. We're exploring the universe of design options that are within the constraints that we care about, that are physical or realistic constraints." Huang pointed to construction and infrastructure work generated by the AI datacenter boom. "Construction workers, plumbers, electricians, networking engineers, all of those incredible jobs are being created in the United States. I think it already has created a million jobs, and then the layer above that, look at all the startups that are being created," he claimed. "That's productivity, increasing the GDP, increasing our growth, which also results in increasing how busy we are. But that's the end. AI makes jobs, and hopefully doesn't take jobs." Asked about people already losing work to AI - global financial services group Barclays Bank said only this …