At the time the ban was imposed Huang was careful to criticise export policy rather than Trump and even expressed his gratitude to Trump for rescinding the pending “AI diffusion” rule that would have put AI chip quotas on most countries, and praised him for helping strike deals with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to build massive data centres.
Having a rich ecosystem of industries and manufacturing so that we could, on the one hand, make the United States better but also reduce our dependency — sole dependency — on other countries, is a smart move
Nvidia boss Jensen Huang
In an interview with CNN over the weekend Huang appeared to be ploughing that field for a further foray into China.
America’s plan to “re-industrialise” technology manufacturing is “exactly the right thing,” Huang said. (Nvidia had already put the relationship with Trump on a positive note earlier in the year by announcing plans to invest $US100 billion in US manufacturing.)
“Having a rich ecosystem of industries and manufacturing so that we could, on the one hand, make the United States better but also reduce our dependency — sole dependency — on other countries, is a smart move,” Huang said.
Despite the Nvidia boss’s violent agreement with Trump, others in the US government are spooked by Huang’s impending China visit. On Friday, a bipartisan pair of US senators sent a letter to Huang warning the chief executive to refrain from meeting with companies that are suspected of undermining US chip export controls.
The ‘AI eating jobs’ challenge is a trickier knot to untie for Huang. Nvidia’s chips are the embedded physical architecture of AI (the major plank of what is referred to as the fourth industrial revolution), which is expected to replace up to 20 per cent of the global workforce. It’s a trend with enormous societal consequences and fewer direct solutions.
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Huang rightly asserts that AI will light a fire under productivity – which is a plus for those that harness it. But he admits that it could lead to job losses, if industries lack innovation, he told CNN.
A fellow tech leader Dario Amodei, recently suggested AI will cause mass employment disruptions. Amodei, the head of US-based AI start-up Anthropic, warned last month that the technology could cause a dramatic spike in unemployment in the very near future and that from the chief executive down, certain types of jobs are under threat.
Now, history shows that during the previous industrial revolutions new jobs were created to replace those lost by advancements in technology. But while evidence is already mounting about the types of work that will be vulnerable to AI – particularly lower level less skilled white-collar workers, we have no clear picture of the new jobs that will be created.
Large companies are already leading the charge in AI and using it to trim workforces and increase productivity but it is the tip of the iceberg. The numbers won’t become glaring until small to medium-sized companies follow.
Once that starts to play out all bets are off on just what our society will look like. That’s something governments around the world haven’t even begun to grapple with. But you can safely assume that the technology companies building the foundations of this AI future are keeping one eye on the implications and the other on their burgeoning financial fortunes.
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