NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang: Children Forget Basic Math Skills Due to AI Use, Doesn't Think It's a Big Deal
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang stated in an interview with The New York Times regarding a study of Chinese students that children are forgetting basic math skills such as long division, multiplication tables, and square roots due to the use of artificial intelligence, but he does not consider this a significant issue.
The study covered approximately 26,000 Chinese students. The host pointed out that while AI can speed up homework and improve grades, knowledge retention is insufficient, leading to a decline in test and exam performance. Huang acknowledged that poor retention is likely occurring among children who use AI extensively, but he clearly stated that he is not worried about it.
Huang gave examples, stating that it is now difficult for children to perform long division, multiplication tables are starting to be forgotten, and square roots are even less remembered; basic math is being forgotten. When asked if there are still essential skills that need to be retained, he agreed that there are important skills but questioned whether basic math is among them, stating that people will discover new skills.
He then cited his own experience, saying that many skills are actually not important. He admitted that he cannot remember his home address, panicked when asked for his postal code while refueling a few years ago, and does not remember his phone number, saying his wife can attest to this, and that he can continue living with these forgetfulness.
This statement does not completely align with his previous public comments. In 2025, he advised young people to continue learning math, reasoning, logic, and programming, emphasizing that even if they do not need to do it themselves, they should master the ability to deconstruct unfamiliar problems using first principles; in 2024, he repeatedly stated that programming would no longer be a necessary condition for success. This interview directly categorizes basic calculations that can be outsourced to models as skills that do not need to be retained.
From a market mechanism perspective, this is an event-driven narrative release: the party selling computation and models is reducing society's obsession with "the human brain must master basic calculations" to allow education, office work, and content production to more quickly delegate tasks to reasoning systems. The ones paying are cloud vendors, model companies, and school purchasers that need training and reasoning capacity; the ones under pressure are traditional educational support and assessment institutions that focus on repetitive training in manual calculations and exam skills. Funding continues to flow into chips, data centers, and applications that can help children complete homework, rather than into human training that reintroduces multiplication tables into classrooms. Whoever frames "forgetting basic calculations" as an acceptable civilizational evolution is providing cultural permission for the next round of computing power orders.
Source: Public Information
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Huang himself entered chip design with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and a master's degree from Stanford at night, having worked at AMD and LSI Logic early in his career before co-founding NVIDIA in 1993. He has publicly stated that math was his favorite subject and has emphasized grades. A person who considers linear algebra and architecture as the foundation of his career is now categorizing long division and multiplication tables as skills that do not need to be retained, indicating that his judgment is not about children's cognitive science but rather whether NVIDIA's next order book should continue to expand.
The capital path is clear. NVIDIA's market value is built on one thing: society is increasingly delegating symbolic operations that were once performed by the human brain to models on GPUs. Education is an untapped reasoning market. Children submitting homework to models, schools purchasing AI tutoring, and parents paying for "faster homework" will all turn into token and computing power consumption. Declaring basic math as a forgettable skill equates to rewriting K12 from "training the human brain" to "calling models," shifting resources from teacher hours and educational materials to clusters, networks, and software subscriptions.
Historical comparisons are not new. After the widespread use of electronic calculators, schools debated whether to continue practicing manual calculations; after navigation became common, urban residents no longer remembered routes; after spell check became widespread, spelling accuracy decreased but writing output increased. Each time follows the same structure: outsourcing automatable underlying processes and elevating scarce attention. The difference is that calculators do not require continuous purchases of power-level computing from the same company, while large models consume chips and cloud resources from NVIDIA's ecosystem every time they solve a problem. Just as OpenAI outsources writing and Google outsources search, NVIDIA aims to outsource computation itself, positioning itself at the revenue end of outsourcing agreements.
This belongs to technological substitution, with the mechanism being the shift of pricing power in cognitive processes. When basic calculations transition from "a skill everyone must internalize" to "a service that can be called at any time," the scarcity of ability shifts from memory and proficiency to who masters the model, who pays for reasoning, and who defines new skills. Classrooms no longer pay for multiplication tables but begin to pay for interfaces and computing power. Forgetting is not a side effect; it is a necessary step in switching demand from human brain training to machine reasoning.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
- Whoever sells computing power declares that the human brain no longer needs to calculate.
- The stronger the tool, the more basic skills are declared obsolete.
- The forgetting list is written for the public, while the order list is kept for oneself.