Students graduating this year will see A.I. transform the workplace as they enter it. They can ride the new technological wave to professional success or be left in the dust, Nvidia’s CEO told graduates at National Taiwan University.
Jensen Huang, in Taipei to give a NTU commencement speech on Friday, told students that the world is entering a new technological era that will surpass the invention of even the internet, the personal computer, and smartphones.
“A.I. has reinvented computing from the ground up,” Huang said. “In every way, this is a rebirth of the computer industry.”
Over the next decade, as graduates establish themselves in the workforce, over $1 trillion of traditional computers will be upgraded or replaced with ones that are better for A.I., he predicted. Chipmaker Nvidia itself touched a $1 trillion market cap on Tuesday after posting estimate-shattering quarterly earnings. The tech company has harnessed the A.I. boom to become the first chipmaker to break the trillion-dollar mark, as its graphics processing units are integral to the operation of generative A.I. platforms.
Huang urged students to do the same as Nvidia by capitalizing on the coming shift. He acknowledged that the new technology will make many jobs obsolete, but said it will produce a spate of new professions including data engineering, A.I. factory operations, A.I. safety engineers, and prompt engineering, which involves crafting and entering requests for A.I. chatbots to generate specific responses including code or visuals.
In his keynote speech at the COMPUTEX Taipei conference on Monday, Huang introduced an A.I. platform through which “everyone can be a programmer.” Called DGX GH200, the technology can produce code from natural language prompts, nodding to Huang’s forecast about prompt engineering becoming a burgeoning line of work.
Between the jobs that will be created and destroyed by A.I., there are many professions that will become hybrids of manual and automated labor. Hedge funds and investment banks are currently experimenting with automating time consuming tasks such as sifting through market research and summarizing funds’ performance statements.
Greg Bond, CEO of investment firm Man Group’s Boston unit, suggested that A.I. could amplify the capabilities of each human worker.
“If we assume research productivity is dropping more globally, you can either hire more people or you could have some digital researchers that are a force multiplier on your existing research and technology staff,” Bond told Bloomberg. “Ultimately what would be nice is if we could automate the innovation process itself.”
Similarly, Huang emphasized that everyone in business, from institutions to individuals, must take advantage of A.I. to “supercharge” performance. He told NTU’s graduates that they would accomplish amazing things with the assistance of an “A.I. copilot” to augment their work.
Huang concluded his speech by recounting decades of “mistakes” and business failures that Nvidia avoided by confronting errors as they arose.
“Retreat does not come easily to the brightest and most successful people,” Huang said. “Yet strategic retreat, sacrifice, deciding what to give up, is at the very core of success.”
He urged students to “run, don’t walk” to greet change, prioritizing adaptability to the global technological revolution.
