“We have reached the tipping point of a new computing era” in which “everyone is a programmer,” Jensen Huang, CEO of chip maker Nvidia, said in a speech last week at the Computex tech conference in Taiwan.

“You just have to say something to your computer,” he added.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT can carry out instructions entered through commands written or spoken in simple language, eliminating the need for laborious coding.

Nvidia, which dominates the AI chip market, briefly reached a stock market valuation of $1 trillion last week. The company’s H100 graphics processor slashes the time needed to train “large language model” AIs such as ChatGPT.

Huang also announced his company’s new DGX H200 supercomputer platform designed to make building AIs faster and easier. Google Cloud, Meta, and Microsoft are expected to be early adopters.

TRENDPOST: In a recent interview with Time magazine, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, “We think the world probably can get to a billion professional developers because the barriers to being a software developer are going to come down.” Thanks to AI, “the ability for more people to enter the field will increase.”

The challenge for coders and programmers, at least in the short term, will be to develop skills in writing the instructions that guide AIs to give the desired results. These so-called “prompt engineers” already are commanding six-figure salaries.

That career also will pass as AIs move from “generative” systems—regurgitating information, images, and other items they find in the digital world—to “general intelligence,” which is the ability to draw conclusions and make inferences.

At that point, a programmer will be looking at a future similar to that of a typewriter repairman—there will be calls for those skills but vastly fewer than today.