Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says that you don’t have to be an expert programmer to prompt AI to write a program for you, making AI the “great equalizer” when it comes to bringing ideas to life with code.
In remarks on stage at London Tech Week on Monday, Huang said that the barrier to code used to be high. Programmers had to learn specific languages and figure out how to architect code efficiently.
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Now, Huang said that AI enables even non-programmers to write code using natural language. AI coding assistants like Cursor and Replit can easily take a written prompt in plain English and turn it into code. The practice of relying on these AI assistants to write a complete program is known as “vibe coding” — and even Google CEO Sundar Pichai admitted last week to “vibe coding” a webpage.
“Now, all of a sudden… there’s a new programming language,” Huang said at London Tech Week, per CNBC. “This new programming language is called ‘human.'”
Huang noted that while relatively few people know how to work with programming languages like C++ or Python, “everybody… knows ‘human’.” The way to ask a computer to write a program is to “just ask it nicely,” as you would a person, Huang said.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at London Tech Week. Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images
AI users are already following Huang’s advice. ChatGPT users are saying “please” and “thank you” to the AI chatbot, treating it as politely as they would a person. The practice has a downside, though: ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has lost tens of millions of dollars in added electricity costs to process the politeness interactions. However, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called it “tens of millions of dollars well spent.”
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Non-coders are already tapping into AI to create projects and web apps without manually writing a single line of code. Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for The New York Times, wrote in February that he was able to vibe code a new app called LunchBox Buddy to help him figure out what he should pack his son for lunch based on a picture of his fridge. Harvard University neuroscience student, Rishab Jain, told NBC News last month that he vibe-coded an app to translate ancient texts into English.
Nvidia is the second most valuable company in the world at the time of writing, with a market capitalization of $3.48 trillion. The AI chipmaker’s stock has grown by nearly 1,500% in the past five years and over 17% this year.