AI is making us dumber, but Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang doesn't care.
"Try to get a kid to do long division right now," Huang said in an interview with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein. "The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots? My goodness. Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter? I don't think it does."
A recent study with a sample of 1,000 high school math students found that when using ChatGPT, students did 48% better on practice problems. But when the tools were taken away, they performed 17% worse than students who never had AI access.
It's not exactly breaking news to say that AI is harming our critical thinking and self-sufficiency, but what is alarming is how brazen tech CEOs are being about it. "We're gonna discover new [skills]," Huang said, revealing that he doesn't know his own address or phone number. "Just maybe not those. There are a lot of skills that don't matter."
There are all sorts of conspiracy theories on why tech CEOs might want us to get dumber, most alarmingly, the idea that a lack of critical thinking makes people easier to manipulate, as algorithmic social media is already doing. But the bottom line is that dependency on AI is good for business. If people need it to write, do math, research, code, or whatever else, they will keep coming back. Replacing core human skills like basic math and ensuring that even the fundamentals require AI makes it a crucial part of society. That's a pretty big market.
Huang has previously dismissed concerns about AI as a "doomer narrative," claiming it's "not helpful to society."
Is it sustainable? No. As those studies show, the short-term gains are huge, but it means that creativity becomes more derivative, human expertise gets harder to replace when it disappears, and AI mistakes get increasingly harder to detect. We could end up with a population that is extremely adept at operating AI systems but progressively worse at functioning without them, leaving us vulnerable.
Nvidia has more reason than most to want AI to become indispensable. The company made $193.7 billion from its data center business in fiscal year 2026, compared with $16 billion from gaming. Nvidia now describes itself as an AI infrastructure company first, not a gaming company. So, it's hardly surprising that Huang is so dismissive of the negative impacts AI could have, considering just how much the company stands to gain from its continued expansion.
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