‘The cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees’: Nvidia exec says right now AI is more expensive than paying human workers

Nvidia’s vice president of applied deep learning, Bryan Catanzaro, recently stated that for his team, “the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees,” highlighting that AI is currently expensive than human workers. This challenges the narrative that widespread tech layoffs (including Meta’s planned cut of ~8,000 jobs and Microsoft’s voluntary buyouts) signal an imminent replacement of humans by AI. An MIT study from 2024 s this, finding that AI automation is economically viable in only 23% of roles where vision is central, and cheaper for humans in the remaining 77.