Jensen Huang warns that some executives’ overconfidence in their AI-related doomsday predictions may lead to a shortage of skilled professionals

(SeaPRwire) –   Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, has pushed back against the widespread narrative that AI will eliminate large portions of the global workforce, while also placing blame on overconfident chief executives who assume they know everything.

During an interview this week with the Special Competitive Studies Project, Huang shared that while people who warn about an AI apocalypse mean well, their predictions will ultimately backfire.

“If we convince all young college graduates to avoid becoming software engineers, and it turns out the United States needs more software engineers than ever before, that will be harmful,” Huang explained. “So we have to be careful about how we communicate this technology’s importance and what it can actually do.”

This conversation comes as the rise of AI agents has made coding accessible to a far broader group of users, while also enabling engineers to produce much more code than they could previously. Investors have sold off shares of software companies, worrying that business clients will use AI to build their own in-house platforms.

While Huang agrees that pushing for safety guardrails for AI is important, he added that it is “ridiculous” to scare people into believing the technology poses an existential threat to humanity, will destroy democracy, or eliminate 50% of all entry-level jobs.

Huang did not name any specific executives, though Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has previously stated that AI could wipe out around 50% of all entry-level white-collar positions.

“These kinds of claims come from people like me, CEOs, and somehow once you become a CEO you develop a God complex, and before you know it you think you know everything,” Huang said. “So I think we have to be careful and keep ourselves grounded by sticking to the facts.”

In actuality, Huang estimates that AI has created more than half a million new jobs over the past few years. This is because when companies integrate AI into their operations, they grow faster and end up hiring more employees.

Data from hiring platform Indeed also shows that demand for software engineers is actually rising. Huang said this illustrates the difference between a job’s tasks and its core purpose, a line that AI doomsayers often blur.

For example, in software engineering, the day-to-day task is writing code, but the core purpose of the role is innovation, problem-solving, connecting unrelated ideas, and identifying new unmet needs.

Another flaw in AI apocalypse arguments, according to Huang, is that they incorrectly assume demand for coding is fixed at roughly 1 billion lines of code per day.

“We need a trillion lines of code written,” he said. “We need far more code than that, because we aim to solve problems across healthcare, science, manufacturing, and retail, to name just a few sectors.”

The key shift is that humans no longer have to sit at a keyboard writing every line of code themselves; we can instead use AI to handle that work.

This dynamic also aligns with the so-called Jevons paradox, which states that greater efficiency can dramatically increase overall consumption. Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, has applied this paradox to the AI era, predicting that AI adoption will create more jobs, not fewer.

When the cost of professional work falls as AI makes tasks more efficient, the overall market for those tasks will actually expand. The total number of companies and workers in these fields — from law to accounting to consulting — will grow.

“When steam engines made coal use more efficient, Britain did not burn less coal, it burned more,” Slok wrote in a recent note. “The same pattern is unfolding for cheaper legal services, consulting services, and financial services.”