Every month, another company announces layoffs and mentions AI in the same breath. Workers notice. So do the economists tracking the numbers.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been watching this play out, too, and he’s asserted publicly that most of what’s being said about it is wrong.
But at a recent appearance in front of founders, he drew a distinction that cuts against most of what Silicon Valley has been saying about the future of work.
Jensen Huang says AI eliminates tasks, not jobs
Speaking at Y Combinator’s Startup School in San Francisco, Huang didn’t mince words when he told founders about the AI effects on jobs: “Many tasks will be automated away.” Then he added the line that mattered more. “Every single job will change, and there’ll be a whole bunch of new jobs,” according to Yahoo Finance.
That framing is not new for Huang. He has made a version of this argument for months, most recently calling the “AI jobs apocalypse” complete nonsense on June 1. His logic rests on a simple split. A task is one repeatable action inside a role, while a job is the broader purpose that the role serves.
Huang has grown more vocal on policy fronts, too. In July, he ended years of social media silence, posting on X (the former Twitter) and joining tech leaders who oppose restrictions on open-weight AI models.
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“The narrative about AI destroying jobs is exactly backwards,” Huang said. “AI automates tasks away, but it doesn’t necessarily eliminate jobs.” He pointed to radiology, noting that hospital backlogs mean fewer scan readers are needed, but more nurses and radiologists get hired to handle the rising patient volume.
Software engineering gets the same treatment in his argument. If AI automates the task of writing code, Huang says companies will hire more engineers to chase bigger ambitions, not fewer. “The backlog of ideas, the backlog of ambition and aspiration, is so high,” he said.
Goldman Sachs AI job loss data: 16,000 positions cut monthly
Goldman Sachs has been counting. Since the start of the year, the bank has been running an AI jobs tracker, and the April numbers weren’t pretty. Roughly 16,000 net positions gone every month, specifically because of AI. Not a recession. Not bad earnings. AI.
By the time Goldman’s AI Adoption Tracker was updated in late May, that monthly figure had eased to around 11,000 net jobs. Jobs added through AI augmentation across sectors offset some of the damage elsewhere, according to Fortune.
April was the worst month Goldman has recorded. About 21,900 workers lost jobs that were specifically attributed to AI that month. Add it all up since Goldman started tracking in 2023, and you get roughly 136,000 AI-attributed layoffs.
Joseph Briggs, one of Goldman’s economists, has put a much bigger number on where this ends up: roughly 15 million American workers displaced over the next decade, close to 9% of the workforce, as TheStreet reported.
Not every Goldman note looks bleak. A May report found the bank’s occupation mismatch index had fallen below its pre-pandemic level, suggesting that the AI labor shock has not yet produced the general skills mismatch people feared.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once suggested that even the CEO role was not immune to AI displacement.
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Why Amodei and Altman walked back their AI job loss warnings
Huang has not been shy about mentioning names. He pushed back on Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who told Axios in May 2025 that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment to 20%.
Amodei has since softened his tone, now arguing that AI may expand human responsibilities.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also once suggested that even the CEO role was not immune to AI displacement, Fortune noted. He then reversed, saying in May that the technology’s rapid development would not trigger a global jobs apocalypse.
Huang has also criticized fellow executives directly for blaming AI on hiring decisions made before the technology matured.
TheStreet reported that, speaking to Singapore broadcaster CNA, he called the practice of linking every layoff to AI simply “too lazy,” arguing the technology has barely had time to reshape workplaces at that scale.
Goldman’s own strategists have flagged a related warning. Workers displaced from AI-exposed roles take about a month longer to find new work and often accept pay cuts near 3% upon reemployment.
“They take approximately one month longer to find a new job and suffer real earnings losses of more than 3% upon reemployment, compared with negligible losses for workers displaced from more stable occupations,” strategist Pierfrancesco Mei warned.
What AI job displacement means for workers right now
The debate carries real stakes for the people caught in the middle of it. Goldman’s own broader labor dashboard, built from 10 separate indicators, shows the labor market running softer than the headline unemployment rate suggests, even before isolating AI’s specific contribution.
Workers displaced from AI-exposed roles are already feeling it differently than those laid off for other reasons, since they take longer to find new work and often must accept pay cuts. That’s a real cost that shows up in household budgets, not in earnings calls.
For now, the two camps are not fully reconciled. Huang bets on productivity gains expanding total output faster than automation shrinks headcount.
Goldman’s data show both things happening at once: new roles emerging through augmentation, and losses concentrated in entry-level white-collar work. Workers stuck in the middle are left watching which trend wins.