Nvidia’s Huang says programming AI is now like training a person

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says artificial intelligence is the “great equalizer” because it lets anyone program using everyday language.

Speaking at London Tech Week on Monday, Huang said that, historically, computing was hard and not available to everyone. “We had to learn programming languages. We had to architect it. We had to design these computers that are very complicated,” he said on stage alongside U.K. Prime Minister Kier Starmer.

“Now, all of a sudden … there’s a new programming language. This new programming language is called ‘human.'”

Conversational AI models were thrown into the spotlight in 2022 when OpenAI‘s ChatGPT exploded onto the scene. In February, the San Francisco-based tech company said it had 400 million weekly active users.

Users can ask chatbots, such as ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini or Microsoft’s Copilot, questions and they respond in a conversational way that feels more like talking to another human than an AI system.

CEO Huang, whose company engineers some of the world’s most advanced semiconductors and AI chips, highlighted that this technology can now be used in programming. He highlighted that very few people know how to use programming languages like C++ or Python, but “everybody … knows ‘human’.”

“The way you program a computer today, to ask the computer to do something for you, even write a program, generate images, write a poem — just ask it nicely,” he said. “And the thing that’s really, really quite amazing is the way you program an AI is like the way you program a person.”

He gave the example of simply asking a computer to write a poem to describe the keynote speech at the London Tech Week event.

“You say: You are an incredible poet … And I would like you to write a poem to describe today’s keynote. And without very much effort, this AI would help you generate such a wonderful poem,” he said.

“And when it answers … you could say: I feel like you could do even better. And it would go off and think about it, and it’ll come back and say, in fact, I I can do better, and it does do a better job.”

Huang’s comments come as a growing number of companies — such as Shopify, Duolingo and Fiverr — encourage their employees to incorporate AI into their work. Indeed, last week OpenAI announced that it has 3 million paying business users.

Huang regularly touts AI’s ability to help workers do their jobs more efficiently and has encouraged workers to embrace the technology as they look to make themselves valuable employees — especially given the horror stories around AI’s potential to replace jobs. 

“This way of interacting with computers, I think, is something that almost anybody can do, and I would just encourage everybody to engage it,” Huang added on Monday. “Children are already doing that themselves naturally, and this is going to be transformative.

— CNBC’s Cheyenne DeVon and Ashton Jackson contributed to this report.