In an interview this week with the Special Competitive Studies Project, he said that while people warning about an AI apocalypse are trying to be helpful, such predictions will backfire.

“If we convinced all the young college graduates to not be software engineers, and it turns out the United States needs more software engineers than ever, that’s hurtful,” Huang explained. “So we have to be mindful of how we communicate the importance of this technology and what it’s able to do.”

That’s as the advent of AI agents has made coding accessible to a broader range of users while also allowing engineers to write much more code. Investors have sold shares of software companies, fearing enterprise customers will use AI to create their own platforms.

Although it’s important to advocate for guard rails on AI, he added that scaring people into believing that the technology will pose an existential threat to humanity, destroy democracy or eliminate 50% of entry-level jobs is “ridiculous.”

He didn’t name names, though Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has previously said AI could wipe out roughly 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs. 

“They’re made by people who are like me, CEOs, and somehow because they became CEOs you adopt a God complex, and before you know it you know everything,” Huang said. “And so I think we have to be careful and really ground ourselves to talking about the facts.”

In reality, he estimated that AI has created more than half a million jobs in the last few years. That’s because when companies incorporate AI, they grow faster and hire more people.

And data from hiring site Indeed shows that demand for software engineers is actually increasing. Huang said this demonstrates the difference between a job’s task and its purpose, which often get conflated by AI doomsayers.

In software engineering, for example, the task is coding, but the purpose is innovation, problem-solving, connecting disparate ideas, and identifying new needs.

Another flaw in AI apocalypse arguments is that it assumes demand for coding is somehow fixed at 1 billion lines of code a day, according to Huang.

“We need a trillion lines of code written,” he said. “We need way more code written than that because we have the imagination of solving problems whether it’s in healthcare or science or in manufacturing and retail.”

The difference is that humans don’t have to sit at a keyboard anymore to write code and can instead use AI to do it.

That also speaks to the so-called Jevons paradox, which says that greater efficiency can dramatically boost consumption. Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok applied it to the AI age, predicting that AI adoption will beget more jobs, not fewer.

When the cost of professional work falls as AI makes tasks more efficient, the market for those tasks will actually expand. The total number of firms and workers in those fields—from law to accounting to consulting—will grow.

“When steam engines made coal more efficient, Britain didn’t burn less coal, it burned more,” Slok wrote in a recent note. “The same pattern is happening for cheaper legal services, consulting services and financial services.”

Hyperliquid (HYPE +1.89%), the native token of the Hyperliquid decentralized exchange (DEX), has been one of the market’s hottest and most volatile cryptocurrencies. It was launched on Nov. 29, 2024, at an initial price of $3.20 per token, but it’s now trading at about $41. Let’s see why this little token skyrocketed — and why it’s a dangerous play for most investors.

Why did Hyperliquid’s price soar?

Before Hyperliquid was launched, it was already actively used to trade perpetual futures contracts (perps) on its DEX. Hyperliquid also initially distributed its tokens via an airdrop to its DEX traders. While some of those recipients immediately sold their tokens for a profit, a larger share held onto them. As a result, the initial demand for Hyperliquid tokens outstripped supply, driving up its price and attracting even more crypto traders.

At the same time, Hyperliquid’s DEX was growing in popularity as a faster, lower-latency alternative to other DEXs, such as dYdX. Most of its trading activity was driven by derivatives, and liquidations on large short positions amplified the token’s upward moves.

Simply put, Hyperliquid wasn’t just another hyped-up meme coin. Its low float, real trading demand, and its DEX’s derivative-driven market structure all drove its price higher. Hyperliquid’s real-world applications made it less speculative than other altcoins that couldn’t be valued by their utility, and it has a tight circulating supply of 255 million tokens (out of 955 million tokens).

Today’s Change

(1.89%) $0.77

Current Price

$41.66

Key Data Points

Market Cap

$9.9B

Day’s Range

$40.65 – $42.31

52wk Range

$19.59 – $59.30

Volume

242M

Why isn’t it worth buying?

Hyperliquid has generated some massive gains for its early investors, but it’s too risky for three simple reasons. First, the Hyperliquid DEX is a new Layer 1 (L1) blockchain that hasn’t yet stood the test of a true crypto winter. Second, its rally over the past one and a half years has largely been driven by its tight supply rather than longer-lasting catalysts.

Lastly, Hyperliquid’s future is entirely pinned to a single trading platform and a single product category: perp trading. Therefore, if Hyperliquid’s trading volume declines in its DEX — either due to competition from other platforms or macro headwinds — its token will fizzle out.

That makes it much riskier than Bitcoin (BTC +0.80%), which is broadly adopted as a neutral digital commodity, and Ethereum (ETH +0.56%), which is used across multiple ecosystems. So while Hyperliquid might have a brighter future than some of the market’s more speculative meme coins, it’s still a high-beta, low-conviction play that could easily burn greedy investors.