Jensen Huang is offering a brutal bargain. The CEO of Nvidia said sacrificing children’s minds to AI is a price he is willing to pay, while agreeing that student cognition is getting much worse. The tradeoff, in his view, is losing certain mental skills to gain new ones.
Huang made the comments while discussing AI’s effect on education, memory, and future abilities. A Chinese study involving 26,000 students using AI in schooling formed part of the wider discussion, alongside questions about whether artificial intelligence strengthens or weakens the mind.
Huang put the decline in basic skills bluntly: “Try to get a kid to do long division right now. The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots, my goodness.” When asked whether AI would preserve those abilities, he answered, “That’s my question for you, I don’t think it does. I don’t think it does.”
The Skills AI Will Replace
Huang did not pretend every lost ability would return in a new form. “There are a lot of skills that don’t matter,” he said, arguing that AI will remove the need for certain forms of calculation and recall. “We’re going to discover new [skills], just maybe not those.”
He used his own memory as evidence for the bargain. “My first confession, I actually don’t know my address… I don’t know my telephone number. I forget these things. I can live with it.” The example is personal, but the principle is broad: if machines handle enough mundane details, people may stop retaining them.
Huang said the cost would include “some finer intellectual dexterity,” but predicted a gain in systems thinking because “AI will take care of those mundane details.” That argument treats cognitive decline in specific areas as an exchange rather than a failure — a tidy framing for an industry selling the machinery that enables the exchange.
The debate involves more than arithmetic. It asks whether skills become unimportant because machines can perform them, or whether people lose something valuable when they no longer practice them. Huang’s answer favors the machine. Children’s minds are the bill.
Safety Concerns and Nvidia’s Expanding Bet
Huang also dismissed fears about AI’s existential threats as a “distraction” that is “not grounded on science.” His position was not that AI systems should operate without limits: if labs insist their products cannot be controlled, he said, “we have to shut the labs down.”
That creates a clear dividing line in his comments. Huang rejected existential-threat arguments as unsupported, yet accepted shutdowns if AI companies cannot control their products. The standard is control, not comfort — and the difference matters as systems move into schooling and other parts of daily life.
OpenAI and Anthropic have warned the UN about AI, placing Huang’s comments against a broader dispute over how serious the risks are and how regulators should respond. Huang’s language pushes back on the most sweeping warnings while leaving room for intervention when products cross a line defined by controllability.
The timing adds an obvious commercial layer. Huang said Nvidia would double its chip sales next year, giving the company a direct stake in the expansion of the systems he describes as replacements for ordinary mental work. The future of cognition is being debated by a chief executive whose business grows when AI use grows.
The remarks were dated Sep 24, 2026, 6:50pm EDT, and Sep 25, 2026 8:51 AM EDT, with discussion involving Anderson Cooper, CNN, Ben Hunte, CNN, and Joe Wilkins, correspondent for Futurism. The central message remains uncomplicated: AI may produce new abilities, but Huang expects people to surrender old ones — and he has decided that is an acceptable price.
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