Nvidia CEO: Anyone who doesn’t embrace AI will be left behind – 05/29/2023 – Tech

“While some are worried that artificial intelligence will take their jobs, someone who specializes in AI will do it.” The alert, with irony, was given by the CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, to the graduates of the National Taiwan University, in Taipei, on Saturday (27) night.

Born in the south of the island and naturalized American, Huang arrived in the city a day after seeing his company’s shares jump 25% on Thursday, reaching a market value of US$ 939 billion (R$ 4.7 trillion), close to the club $1 trillion (R$5 trillion) from tech giants like Apple or oil giants like Saudi Aramco.

Previously identified with chips for games, the American Nvidia has become a Wall Street bet to apply in artificial intelligence, because it also produces the GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) that are used to train language models for generative AI, such as ChatGPT.

Billionaire Huang was spotted on Friday (26) shopping alone at one of the city’s popular night markets on Raohe Street. The image that made the rounds on social media platforms in Taiwan such as Line. At the senior lecture the following night, he arrived accompanied by his parents.

His message was aimed above all at the young people themselves, also accompanied by their parents. “You are entering a much more complex world, with geopolitical and environmental challenges”, he began, comparing 2023 with 1984, when he graduated as an engineer in Oregon, in the United States.

If in that year Apple and IBM launched their personal computers, in this year the change will come with AI. “It will create new jobs that didn’t exist, automated tasks will make other jobs obsolete. You need to learn to do amazing things with an AI co-pilot by your side.”

“It’s a renaissance for the computer industry and a golden chance for Taiwanese companies,” Huang said of the companies. Then, to encourage persistence in undergraduates, he said that after graduating he faced decades of failures, and detailed three of them.

“What are you going to create?” he teased at last. “Whatever it is, chase it like we did. Either you’re chasing food or you’re running from becoming food.”

Huang has generally countered the caution of other AI executives such as Google’s Sundar Pichai and Baidu’s Robin Li.

Before the jump in Nvidia shares and the trip, Huang gave an interview to the Financial Times on Wednesday (24), questioning the US government’s veto on chip sales to China —which left him “with his hands tied behind his back” and threatens “enormous damage” to the US technology sector.

“If [a China] cannot buy from the US, they will make it themselves. The US must be careful. China is a very important market for the technology industry. If we are deprived of the Chinese market, we have no contingency for that. There is no other China, there is only one China.”

Regarding government incentives to build new local chip factories or “fabs”, as they are called, he stated that, “if American industry needs a third less capacity [pela perda do mercado chinês]no one will need fabs, we’ll end up swimming in fabs”.

He also addressed Taiwanese production, whose “fabs” are being taken to the US. “We can theoretically produce chips outside of Taiwan, it’s possible, but the Chinese market cannot be replaced. That’s impossible. So you have to ask yourself which way you want to move forward.”