Jensen Huang isn't feeling those "white-collar bloodbath" warnings.
The Nvidia CEO countered all the AI doomerism at Y Combinator's Startup School. He differentiated between "tasks" and "jobs" — and said AI could eliminate the former, not the latter.
"Every single job will change, and there will be a whole bunch of new jobs," Huang said. "The narrative of AI destroying jobs is exactly backward."
Huang gave an example of a so-called "task." Some workers make phone calls, recieve a complaint, and respond based on information in a database. "That task will be automated away," he said.
Indeed, customer service has been a highly sensitive industry to AI's disruption. Last week, Uber laid off 10% of its customer service workers, citing the technology.
But tasks are not jobs, Huang said. "The reason for that is, the job of a person has a purpose, and that purpose has many tasks," he said.
He gave the example of radiologists. The "task" of reading radiology scans has been automated away, Huang said. While AI radiology tools are powerful and popular, it's not clear that radiologists have stopped reading scans altogether. Radiology jobs are still growing, he said.
"The reason for that is the backlog of patients is incredibly high," he said. "Now, doctors and hospitals can admit a lot more patients."
Huang also gave the example of software engineering, a field that has been radically disrupted by AI. Many coders have shifted from writing code to advising AI code editors like Claude Code and Codex.
Here, the coding itself is the "task" being automated. Meanwhile, software jobs are on the rise.
"The backlog of ideas, the backlog of ambition and aspiration, is so high," Huang said. "If we can automate away the task of programming, we could hire more software engineers to do more things."
Huang name-checked the legal startup, Harvey. While some worried that the tool would eliminate paralegal jobs, the role is actually growing "like crazy," he said.
This job expansion is less clear. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expected the role to experience "little or no change" between 2024 and 2034.
This vision of the labor market is far different from Dario Amodei's. In 2025, the Anthropic CEO predicted that AI could eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs.
Amodei has since changed his tune, speaking about how AI will surge productivity, though he still believes job loss could be "intrinsic" to AI.
Huang agreed that workers will get better and faster — and that it could increase the job supply.
"This is a classic example of productivity increasing growth," Huang said. "Increasing growth drives more employment."
