Throughout the night, Huang struck an optimistic note. “AI creates jobs,” he asserted during the discussion, adding that “AI is [the] United States’ best opportunity to re-industrialize” itself. Huang noted that the AI industry is powered by a new breed of industrial factories — the kinds producing the hardware that acts as critical infrastructure for the AI business. (Huang’s company notably sells a lot of that hardware.) Those factories necessarily need workers, as does the rest of the blossoming AI industry.

Just because a specific task is automated doesn’t mean that a person’s entire job is going to be replaced, Huang reasoned. People who believe this “misunderstand that the purpose of a job and the task of a job are related” but not ultimately the same thing, he said. In other words, Huang’s argument is that even when AI takes over a discrete task within a role, the broader function that employee serves in an organization is likely to remain.

Relatedly, Huang was critical of people who allege AI will dominate humanity or that it will wipe out huge sectors of the economy. “My greatest concern is that we scare … people — all the people that we’re telling these science-fiction stories to, to the point where AI is so unpopular in the United States, or people are so afraid of it, that they don’t actually engage it,” he said.

Ironically, much of the “doomer” rhetoric has been generated by the AI industry itself, and critics maintain that such hyperbole has been used as a marketing gimmick designed to gin up buzz and excitement for products that aren’t anywhere near the capabilities that such rhetoric suggests.