Jensen Huang, the Co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, shared insights about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) and offered guidance to young professionals during his recent appearance at The Hill & Valley Forum in Washington, D.C. In his keynote, Huang focused on the development of generative AI. He elaborated on how emerging technologies will disrupt every industry over the next five to ten years.
In April 1993, Huang, along with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, co-founded Nvidia. They first thought of the concept over a meal at a Denny’s diner in San Jose, California. Under his leadership, Nvidia has recently achieved the milestone of becoming the world’s most valuable company. Today, the tech giant leads the semiconductor sector through radical advances in graphics processing units (GPUs) and artificial intelligence (AI).
Huang received his electrical engineering degree from Oregon State University in 1984. He ultimately earned and graduated with his master’s degree from Stanford University in 1992. His intellectual underpinnings orchestrated a lifelong career that would continue to reshape America’s technical landscape across multiple industries.
In great detail, Huang outlined the different phases of AI evolution. He termed the first wave “Perception AI,” that is, teaching machines to comprehend the visual and audio world. The second wave, called “Generative AI,” includes systems that build content and solutions from underlying data objects. He pointed to an upcoming phase that he called “Physical AI,” which combines AI with physical, real-world objects.
“We’re now in this age called ‘Reasoning AI’… where you now have AI that can understand, it can generate, and solve problems and recognize conditions that we’ve never seen before,” – Jensen Huang
Huang described the concept of “agentic AI.” Such a brand of Reasoning AI would be able to autonomously perform tasks in a physical world, making it valuable in many other ways. He said that this evolution will result in advancements in robotics, a field where Nvidia is making, and betting, big.
“And when you take that physical AI and then you put it into a physical object called a robot, you get robotics,” – Jensen Huang
In his talk, Huang spoke directly to the kinds of skills that young professionals should be focusing on. He advised that if he were a 20-year-old today, he would prioritize fields within the physical sciences over software sciences. He insisted that industries need to understand basic things such as physics, friction, and inertia. These ideas will be important as they relate to smart technology.
“For the young, 20-year-old Jensen, that’s graduated now, he probably would have chosen … more of the physical sciences than the software sciences,” – Jensen Huang
As industries like construction and manufacturing deal with persistent issues like labor shortages, Huang emphasized the need to better understand these concepts. To counter that risk, Nvidia is proactively making the issue moot by rapidly building new plants and fabs around the United States.
“This is really, really important for us now, because we’re building plants and factories all over the United States,” – Jensen Huang
He said he was bullish on the future as these mills super automate themselves with robotics. According to Huang, these advancements will address the labor shortages now being felt around the world.
“So hopefully, in the next 10 years, as we build out this new generation of plants and factories, they’re highly robotic and they’re helping us deal with the severe labor shortage that we have all over the world,” – Jensen Huang