Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says this year will be a good year to graduate thanks to AI Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Timing is everything. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told graduates this weekend that they are starting their careers at a great time, thanks to opportunities in the field of artificial intelligence.
NVIDIA’s market cap hits $1 trillion this week after the California-based semiconductor maker reported a better-than-expected quarter and expected revenue to top $11 billion and $5 billion next quarter. Closer to the dollar, % beating analysts’ expectations, leaving the likes of Meta, Tesla and Berkshire Hathaway on the sidelines. Huang says there have been “incredible orders” as the data center aims to become AI-enabled for him.
In his keynote speech at the National Taiwan University commencement ceremony in Taipei on Saturday, Mr. Huang said he too had benefited from good timing. After spending part of his childhood in Taiwan, he graduated from Oregon State University in 1984. At this time, the debut of the Apple Macintosh sparked a personal computing revolution.
1984 was “a great year to graduate,” he says, “and 2023 will be no different.”
He added that by 2023, AI “will have its graduates in the workforce in the same way that computing has been reinvented from the ground up.” In every sense of the word, this is the comeback of the computer industry. ”
“AI has created immense opportunities,” continued the billionaire CEO. “Agile companies will leverage AI to rise to the top,” while those that aren’t will perish. Graduates “must use AI to do great things with an AI co-pilot by their side,” he added.
AI will create “new jobs that never existed before,” such as agile engineering, AI factory operations and AI safety engineers, he said. Although he acknowledged that some jobs will be lost due to automation, he said that people are worried that AI will take their jobs, but in reality they could be taken by people who know how to use AI. He added that it is possible.
Huang urged the graduates to “face up to failure and have the humility to admit their mistakes”, telling them to “endure pain and suffering”. He described NVIDIA’s early failures as “humiliating and embarrassing.” For example, Nvidia at one point realized its “technically poor” architecture was the “wrong strategy,” but it already landed a deal with Sega to help build new game consoles using it. was doing.
“We had to cancel, but we had to get Sega paid in full or Nvidia would go out of business. I was too embarrassed to ask,” he explained, but to his surprise, , Sega’s CEO agreed, giving NVIDIA “six months to live.”
Nvidia survived and became a major player, first in the gaming industry and now in the field of artificial intelligence.
Now that the AI era has arrived, Mr. Huang said to graduates, “Follow the AI era as we do. Don’t walk, run.”
