Jensen Huang says AI jobs fears overlook task automation
Nvidia’s CEO told Y Combinator that AI will automate work tasks while creating new roles, even as Goldman Sachs warns of displacement.
By Hana Yoshida · Markets Reporter
3 min read
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said AI jobs fears are focused on the wrong unit of work: the task, rather than the job itself. Speaking at Y Combinator’s Startup School in San Francisco, Huang argued that artificial intelligence will change every role and create new ones, according to a video published Monday by the startup accelerator.
Huang said many tasks will be automated, but he rejected the view that the result must be broad job destruction. His comments push against warnings from some economists and AI executives that office workers, especially in entry-level roles, face sharp losses as companies add AI tools.
What did Jensen Huang say about AI and jobs?
Huang’s central point was that jobs combine many tasks around a larger purpose. If AI removes some of those tasks, he said, the purpose of the job can remain while workers shift to other responsibilities.
He told the audience that the idea of AI destroying jobs has the relationship backward. In Huang’s view, task automation can raise productivity, allow companies to take on more work and increase hiring rather than reduce it across the board.
Goldman Sachs has offered a more cautious view of the transition. In its AI Adoption Tracker earlier this year, the bank said AI was contributing to net job losses of 11,000 a month in industries most exposed to the technology, including marketing, graphic design and customer service. Goldman said that figure was down from an earlier estimate of about 16,000 net jobs lost each month, while entry-level and white-collar workers remained under pressure.
Goldman senior global economist Joseph Briggs has also estimated that roughly 9% of the U.S. workforce, or about 15 million people, could be displaced from their jobs over the next decade as AI spreads.
Other AI leaders have issued stronger warnings, though some have since moderated them. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Axios in May 2025 that AI could remove half of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years and lift unemployment to 20%. He has since said automation may enlarge what people do at work. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once said even chief executives could be vulnerable to AI displacement, but Reuters reported that he said in May that AI was unlikely to cause a global “jobs apocalypse.”
Why did Huang point to radiologists?
Huang used radiology as an example of a field where AI can automate a task without erasing the profession. Geoffrey Hinton, often called a “Godfather of AI,” said in 2016 that hospitals should stop training radiologists because deep learning would outperform them within five years; he later revised that view in an interview with The New York Times.
Radiology employment did not collapse. A study in the Journal of the American College of Radiology found that the number of practicing radiologists rose about 12% from 2010 to 2022, and another JACR study projected growth of 25.7% to 40.3% by 2055, depending on whether residency slots keep expanding.
Huang said high patient backlogs help explain why AI-assisted scan reading could increase demand for radiologists and nurses by allowing hospitals to serve more people. Experts previously told Fortune that radiologists also advise other doctors, monitor patients and, in interventional radiology, perform procedures.
Huang applied the same logic to software engineering. He said that if AI agents automate parts of coding, companies may hire more developers because they can pursue more ideas and larger projects.
Huang has acknowledged in past comments that some jobs may disappear as automation advances and that workers skilled with AI may have an edge over those who are not. His broader argument at Y Combinator was that productivity gains can feed growth, and that growth can support more employment.
This story draws on original reporting from Fortune.