Have you thought about it? What does it mean to be smart in this day and age? Jensen Huang, the co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, the world's most valuable tech giant powering the artificial intelligence revolution, was asked the same question.
“Who's the smartest person you've ever met?”
Earlier this year, the tech giant with 33 years of experience, the single-longest-serving chief executive in the S&P 500, was met with this question. He was asked this on the podcast A Bit Personal with Jodi Shelton. For a driven and visionary boss like Huang, that’s the kind of question that would jolt the memory and lead to an anecdote. But contrary to what one may assume, the Nvidia boss found this question impossible to answer. His answer went sideways in the best possible way! "I can't answer that question," he said. Then he explained why, and in doing so, he explained how AI is reshaping the way we measure human intelligence and value.
AI is changing the definition of ‘smart’
“Who's the smartest person you've ever met?” Jodi Shelton asked. If she had asked this question at least half a decade ago, Huang would have answered instantly. But with the evolution of artificial intelligence, everything is different. “The definition of smart is somebody who's intelligent, solves problems, technical. But I find that that's a commodity. And we're about to prove that artificial intelligence is able to handle that part easiest, right,” the Nvidia CEO said. He also shared an example that would help explain it better. “Everybody thought software programming is the ultimate smart profession. Look, what is the first thing that AI is solving? Software programming,” he said. With AI, everything changed. Code completion tools can now write code. AI systems debug. The profession that once required peak intelligence is now commodified, accessible and insanely fast. The real question is: if programming falls this quickly, what doesn't? Jensen Huang emphasised that the ‘definition of smart is very different from what most people think’.
What does it mean to be ‘smart’ in the AI age?
For decades, we've optimised everything around training people to solve defined problems efficiently. Schools, universities and hiring systems all worked for that. Now those skills have lost their charm. According to Huang, a smart person today is someone who is technically astute, but also has empathy, the ability to read what isn't said, and the capacity to sense around corners. “I think, long-term, the definition of smart and my personal definition of smart, is someone who sits at that intersection of being technically astute, but (with) human empathy and having the ability to infer the unspoken around the corners, the unknowables.” "People who are able to see around corners are truly, truly smart," he said. "And their value is incredible.” He calls this skill or instinct ‘feeling the vibe’. “To be able to preempt problems before they show up, just because you feel the vibe.” And this vibe isn’t really one thing, according to Huang. It's a form of intelligence nearly opposite to what we've been training for all this while. “And the vibe came from a combination of data analysis, first principles, life experience, wisdom, (and) sensing other people. That vibe, that I think, that's smart. That, I think, is going to be the future definition of smart,” he explained. So the smart person in today’s era should be able to recognise patterns at a human level, take intuitive leaps, and also have the ability to operate in ambiguity. And machines cannot do any of this, not yet. They can process data and find patterns. But they can't feel the room. That is where human intelligence is crucial. They can't know what matters when the criteria keep shifting. They can't navigate the unknowable. But humans can. And those who can are the smartest. Huang also shared the sharpest insight. The kind of smartest person he described may not necessarily tick all the boxes of the conventional metrics used to evaluate intelligence. “And that person might actually score horribly on the SAT,” the Nvidia CEO said. The most intelligent people in this AI age are not the ones with the most technical skills, but those who bring something AI cannot easily replicate.
