Inc. Magazine
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said humanoid robots could reach human level abilities in 2026 and believes they will create jobs not cut them especially as populations shrink. Critics warn AI is already causing job losses with reports showing thousands of roles impacted.
Jensen Huang Just Made a Bold Prediction About Humanoid Robots—and Says It Will Happen ‘This Year’
Author: Chris Morris
Walk the floor of CES and you won’t have to search too hard to find a humanoid robot. Walk a bit further and you’re likely to see one that’s not functioning exactly as its creators intended. But that’s not dampening Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s enthusiasm one bit.
In a Q&A session on Tuesday at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, Huang was asked when he expected these robots would have human-level capabilities. His response was quick and confident: “This year.”
It’s the sort of answer you might expect from someone in Huang’s position. As with artificial intelligence, the success of the robotics industry is a success for Nvidia. But with demonstrations going awry, even in the next room over, it’s a bold assertion.
Not only does Huang believe humanoid robots will boast human-level capabilities this year, he says they’ll also create jobs, rather than reduce them.
“Having robots will create jobs,” Huang said. In fact, Huang says, due to population decline, “We will need more ‘AI immigrants’ to … do the kind of work we decided not to do anymore.”
There are some hurdles to clear first, he admits. The technology is moving forward at an extremely fast pace, but there are some areas that still need substantial improvement. Leading that list? Fine motor skills.
“Fine motor skills [are] extremely hard—and the reason for that is building a hand is hard,” he says. “The motor technology is hard. We don’t just use our eyes. We also use touch. And the robot only has eyes, so it needs to have touch.”
Locomotion is a challenge as well. Today’s robots, for the most part, move like … well, robots. Huang, though, said there has been incredible progress in that area and he believes it will be the first significant challenge to be solved.
After that, he says, gross motor articulation and grasping will be conquered, then fine motor skills.
Once those skills are mastered, robots could be able to begin taking some positions that they’re unable to fill today. That, understandably, has some people worried about their livelihood. Huang says he thinks the jobs robots will take, however, will be the ones that people don’t want now.
“The robotic revolution will replace the labor loss and therefore is going to drive up the economy—and when the economy increases, we hire more people,” he says. “There are a lot of jobs that won’t be replaced by AI for a very long time. We just need the economy to do well.”
Not everyone is quite as bullish on robots—a physical extension of AI—entering the workforce as Huang. A report from Challenger, Grey and Christmas released last October found that AI was responsible for over 17,000 lost jobs in the first 10 months of 2025.
AI and robotics, the firm said, are “not only costing jobs, but also making it difficult to land positions, particularly for entry-level engineers.”
Nobel laureate and the so-called “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton, meanwhile, said in September that AI will indeed drive a “huge rise in profits,” but that will come at the cost of creating “massive unemployment.”
Credits: TCA, LLC.