Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang is urging Washington to prepare for artificial intelligence to upend the global economy.
Mr. Huang told the Hill & Valley Forum of policymakers and technologists on Capitol Hill the disruption caused by AI advances will be creative and turbulent.
“New jobs will be created, some jobs will be lost, every job will be changed,” Mr. Huang said Wednesday.
Nvidia said this month it would produce AI supercomputers entirely in the U.S. at manufacturing sites in Arizona and Texas.
Mr. Huang said such manufacturing will create a range of jobs beyond those typically associated with AI technology, including construction workers, steelworkers and plumbers.
Eventually, Mr. Huang said, all workers will need to grapple with AI — but they won’t be replaced by AI.
“It’s not AI that’s going to take your job, it’s not AI that’s going to destroy your company; it’s the company and the person who uses AI that’s going to take your job,” he said.
People’s fears about AI adoption are not limited to labor upheaval, but also to misuse and abuse by governments and criminals.
The Hill & Valley Forum is a regular gathering of Silicon Valley executives, financiers and technologists with policymakers and lawmakers in Washington, convened by co-founders Jacob Helberg, Delian Asparouhov and Christian Garrett, who have experience developing and funding tech startups.
Pro-Palestinian protesters interrupted remarks from Palantir CEO Alex Karp at the gathering over his software company’s product use in the war in Gaza.
After attempting to engage a protester in debate to no avail, Mr. Karp said the protester was the product of bad ideology.
But Mr. Karp said people’s concerns about AI weaponization are not misplaced.
“The thing that scares people about AI is scary, which is that it can be abused,” Mr. Karp told the gathering. “It will give great powers much more power than they otherwise would have without it, and it will lead to a hierarchical disparity which will lead to how the world is governed, which is why we have to win this in America.”
The Trump administration is eager to incentivize Silicon Valley to win the race for top AI tools.
White House National Security Adviser Mike Waltz told the audience to prepare for new work with President Trump.
“I want everyone to appreciate and understand that the administration is absolutely dedicated to reforming the way we acquire technology, to reform the way we acquire our systems, to go to capability-based requirements,” Mr. Waltz said. “We’re looking at, we’re seriously looking at modernization.”
While Silicon Valley executives and Mr. Trump’s team look to accelerate the production of AI tools and their adoption, some technologists are warning that any misstep could do major damage.
“The U.S. companies are really good at going really, really fast, and where we need help is ensuring that the U.S. industry doesn’t have accidents or misuses of its technology,” Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark said at the forum. “Because an accident or a misuse of our technology would lead to a regulatory blowback that would probably do to this industry what happened to the nuclear power industry.”
Nuclear power has long concerned environmental activists but has scored new fans as major AI projects thirst for energy. Big Tech companies such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft are among those pursuing nuclear power to fuel their data centers.
