Physical AI and robotics will be NVIDIA's next ten billion dollar incremental market.

Written by: Bu Shuqing, Wall Street News

In the current era where AI is reshaping the computer industry, what abilities do entrepreneurs need the most? Jensen Huang's answer is not programming, but systems thinking, resilience, and the courage to venture into unknown territories.

Recently, in a public interview aimed at early-stage entrepreneurs (Startup School), Jensen Huang engaged in nearly an hour-long conversation with YC CEO Garry Tan, sharing his latest insights on entrepreneurship, AI industry transformation, corporate management, and personal growth about the next generation of entrepreneurial opportunities.

As the computer industry is being completely reset, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang clearly pointed out that systems thinking will become the core skill of the future, and physical AI and robotics will be NVIDIA's next ten billion dollar incremental market.

Currently, the market is closely watching where NVIDIA's growth potential lies after breaking the trillion-dollar market value. In response, Jensen Huang provided a clear answer in the interview: from AI agents to physical AI, the reset of the tech industry has just begun.

Physical AI and Robotics: The Next Ten Billion Dollar Explosion Point

Besides large language models, the capital market is most focused on the commercialization landing points of embodied intelligence and robotics. Jensen Huang threw out an extremely counterintuitive viewpoint during the conversation: "I would say that the robots' 'ChatGPT moment' happened several years ago."

He recalled that when NVIDIA internally successfully generated a video of a finger moving and a hand picking up a glass, he realized that artificial intelligence in the physical world was about to break through. "If I can generate a video of finger movement, why can't I make a robot do the same thing? At that moment, I realized that the agile movement of robotic joints was about to be achieved."

Regarding future business guidance, Jensen Huang first depicted a vast commercial landscape of physical AI to the market. He pointed out that autonomous driving is currently the only market ample enough, with relatively standardized technology, real economic value, and that can get the data flywheel turning.

“We have it in Tesla cars, in Mercedes data centers and vehicles, and we even open-sourced our self-developed autonomous driving stack because agriculture, mail delivery, and warehouse logistics all need it.” Jensen Huang revealed a stunning statistic: “Our physical AI business, including autonomous driving, is currently nearing 10 billion dollars. This could very well become one of the largest industries in the world; it doesn’t require two or three years, but it also doesn’t take ten years. This will be our next ten billion dollar business.”

AI Agents: A New Software Form and Control Challenges

In the evolution of the software ecosystem, Jensen Huang asserted, “Agents are the new software.” He revealed that NVIDIA has been using various AI agents on a large scale to accelerate the research and development process, “We let hundreds of thousands of flowers bloom simultaneously, allowing everyone to freely choose tools, and cloud computing code runs autonomously within NVIDIA's internal sandbox. It’s fantastic.”

However, he also pointed out the core bottleneck currently faced by agent technology—controllability.

“Whether using RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) or prompts, the current output control is still too coarse. The biggest breakthrough will be whether we can achieve extremely fine-grained control over the agents.”

Jensen Huang emphasized, “As long as we change one word in the plan document, it can create specific differences, such as changing just one pixel, one polygon, one component in a CAD file, and then regenerating everything else. This level of control and collaboration with agents will be a game changer.”

Will AI Take Jobs? "This Narrative is Completely Backwards"

With the leap in AI capabilities, market concerns about "AI replacing humans" have surged. Jensen Huang not only denied this but also provided a unique perspective from an economic standpoint.

“The narrative about AI destroying jobs is exactly backwards. AI will indeed eliminate certain specific 'tasks', but it will never eliminate 'jobs'.”

He supported this logic with specific data and industry realities: “The 'task' of programming is being automated, but the number of software engineering positions is growing at a rate of 10% per year; the task of reading radiology images has been automated, but in the past few years, the number of radiologists' jobs has increased by over 20%. Why? Because the backlog of demand is enormous.”

Jensen Huang pointed out that due to the incredible backlog of creativity, ambition, cases, and patients, when AI takes over tedious lower-level work, companies will actually need to hire more people to accomplish more ambitious things. “Increased productivity leads to growth, and growth drives more employment; that’s the underlying law.”

The Survival Rule of the Era: Systems Thinking and "Founder Mode"

In response to the classic question of "What should young people learn now?", Jensen Huang provided very hardcore advice. He bluntly stated that the “simple tasks” of sitting in front of a computer and handwriting code will definitely be automated, and even the “long division” learned by the older generation has long been eliminated.

“Fundamental tasks will be accomplished by agents in the future. Therefore, you must have the abstract capability of ‘systems thinking’. Systems thinking will be the new programming in the future.” Jensen Huang suggested that in this reset era of computing, young people should return to “hard sciences”: “Physics, chemistry, biology, computer engineering, and interdisciplinary sciences that solve extremely difficult problems will never go out of style.”

At the end of the interview, Jensen Huang shared his highly personal management philosophy. He strongly endorsed the recently discussed "Founder Mode" in Silicon Valley.

In the past, NVIDIA almost went bankrupt due to choosing the wrong 3D graphics algorithm; he saved the company by relying on three OpenGL textbooks he bought from a bookstore. This experience made him realize that traditional management dogma is meaningless in the face of rapidly changing technology.

“You are building an F1 car that you plan to race, so you have to build it in a way that you can drive it. You should make the car adapt to you.”

When faced with skepticism about “what happens if you don’t use traditional management techniques after leaving the company,” Jensen Huang responded candidly: “I tell them that someday when I die in my position, they just need to reshape the company for the next CEO. To achieve our mission, you must adjust the organization in whatever way is needed to adapt to you.”

For today’s entrepreneurs, Jensen Huang issued the strongest call: “This is the best time to start a business in the past 60 years. The entire computer industry has been completely reset. As long as you always keep in mind the question ‘How hard can it be?’, and let difficulties come one step at a time, you will eventually reach your NVIDIA moment.”