The CEO of Nvidia Admits What Everybody Is Afraid of About AI

Gizmodo

a day ago

This week, Nvidia became the first company in history to be worth $4 trillion. It's a number so large it's almost meaningless, more than the entire economy of Germany or the United Kingdom. While Wall Street celebrates, the question for everyone else is simple: So what?
The answer, according to Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang, is that this is not just about stock prices. It's about a fundamental rewiring of our world.
So why is this one company so important? In the simplest terms, Nvidia makes the 'brains' for artificial intelligence. Their advanced chips, known as GPUs, are the engines that power everything from ChatGPT to the complex AI models being built by Google and Microsoft. In the global gold rush for AI, Nvidia is selling all the picks and shovels, and it has made them the most powerful company on the planet.
In a wide ranging interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria, Huang, the company's leather jacket clad founder, explained what this new era of AI, powered by his chips, will mean for ordinary people.
Huang didn't sugarcoat it. 'Everybody's jobs will be affected, 'Everybody's jobs will be affected. Some jobs will be lost,' he said. Some will disappear. Others will be reborn. The hope, he said, is that AI will boost productivity so dramatically that society becomes richer overall, even if the disruption is painful along the way.
He admitted the stakes are high. A recent World Economic Forum survey found that 41% of employers plan to reduce their workforce by 2030 because of AI. And inside Nvidia itself, Huang said, using AI isn't just encouraged. It's mandatory. One of Huang's boldest claims is that AI's future depends on America learning to build things again. He offered surprising support for the Trump administration's push to re-industrialize the country, calling it not just a smart political move but an economic necessity.
'That passion, the skill, the craft of making things; the ability to make things is valuable for economic growth. It's valuable for a stable society with people who can create a wonderful life and a wonderful career without having to get a PhD in physics,' he said. Huang believes that onshoring manufacturing will strengthen national security, reduce reliance on foreign chipmakers like Taiwan's TSMC, and open high-paying jobs to workers without advanced degrees.
This stance aligns with Trump's tariffs and 'Made in America' push, a rare moment of agreement between Big Tech and MAGA world.
In perhaps his most optimistic prediction, Huang described AI's power to revolutionize medicine. He believes AI tools will speed up drug discovery, crack the code of human biology, and even help researchers cure all disease.
'Over time, we're going to have virtual assistant researchers and scientists to help us essentially cure all disease,' Huang said.
AI models are already being trained on the 'language' of proteins, chemicals, and genetics. Huang says we'll soon see powerful AI partners in labs across the world.
You may not see them yet, but Huang says the technology for physical, intelligent robots already works, and that we'll see them in the next three to five years. He calls them 'VLA models,' short for vision-language-action. These robots will be able to see, understand instructions, and take action in the real world.
Huang didn't dodge the darker side of the AI boom. When asked about controversies like Elon Musk's chatbot Grok spreading antisemitic content, he admitted 'some harm will be done.'
But he urged people to be patient as safety tools improve. He said most AI models already use other AIs to fact-check outputs, and the technology is getting better every day.
His bottom line: AI will be overwhelmingly positive, even if it gets messy along the way.
Jensen Huang talks about AI curing diseases and reshaping work. But here's what's left unsaid: every transformation he describes flows through Nvidia. They make the chips. They set the pace. And now, at $4 trillion, they have the leverage to steer the AI era in their favor. We've seen this playbook before. Tech giants make utopian promises, capture the infrastructure, and then decide who gets access, and at what cost. From Amazon warehouses to Facebook news feeds, the pattern is always the same: consolidation, disruption, control.
The AI hype machine keeps selling inevitability. But behind the scenes, this is a story about raw power. Nvidia is becoming a gatekeeper for what's possible in science, labor, and security. And most of us didn't get a vote.
Huang says harm will happen. But history tells us that when companies promise to fix the world with tech, the harm tends to land on the same people every time.