Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia and arguably the most powerful man in the current AI revolution, said something quietly devastating to students at Cambridge University recently.

“Intelligence is about to be a commodity.”

He wasn’t being pessimistic. He was being precise. The thing we’ve spent decades credentialing, testing, and competing over, y’know, our raw cognitive processing, is becoming as abundant and cheap as tap water. AI scores 100% on the test before we pick up our pencil.

So where does that leave people like you and me?

The ones who’ve built things, raised families, navigated impossible decisions, and learned hard lessons the only way one can — by living them?

Huang says the only thing that is left is ‘poorly defined work’. He is referring to the problems with no multiple-choice answers. The moments where the data is contradictory, the path doesn’t exist yet, and someone still has to decide.
I’d call that wisdom. And we all have far more of it than we think.

Here’s the clearest way I can illustrate it. You can give AI a bread recipe. Every measurement precise, every step sequenced. And AI will execute it flawlessly. In text. That’s defined work. And AI was born for it.

But ask it why the loaf didn’t rise — even though you followed the recipe exactly — and watch it flounder. Because that answer doesn’t live in the instructions. It lives in the feel of the dough when the humidity was higher than usual. It lives in the knowledge that your oven runs hot, or that the yeast was just a little too old. It lives in the dozen loaves before this one that taught you things no recipe ever mentioned.

That’s not something Nvidia can manufacture. Not yet. Probably not ever.

Huang actually offers four markers of this kind of wisdom: taste, first principles thinking, strategic subtraction, and honouring your scars. I’m betting you’ll recognize ways to develop each further in your own life.

Taste.

The ability to look at a hundred options and know which one is right. Not because you calculated it. Because you’ve seen enough to feel it. Every time you’ve walked into a room and known something was off before anyone said a word, that was taste.

First Principles Thinking.

The habit of going back to what you actually know to be true, rather than following the crowd. When everyone around you is panicking or chasing a trend, what grounds you isn’t more information. It’s clarity about what fundamentally matters. That clarity is hard-won.

Strategic Subtraction.

Knowing what to leave out. Huang argues that the most valuable skill in an age of infinite information isn’t adding more. It’s removing what doesn’t belong. Every time you’ve said “we don’t need to complicate this” or “that’s not actually the problem,” you were doing this.

Honouring Your Scars.

For me, this is the BEST and ONLY one. His exact words: “Greatness comes from character. Character comes from people who have suffered.” AI has read everything. It has suffered exactly nothing. Your losses, your failures, your redirections. NONE of those are liabilities. They’re the most sophisticated analytical instruments in the room!

The leaders and professionals I talk to most often are the ones who achieved everything the system promised and then found it hollow. What Huang is describing, I think, is why. We optimized for the commodity. We underinvested in the wisdom.

The good news: the market is correcting. Slowly, uncomfortably, but unmistakably. Smart is cheap. What you’ve lived through isn’t. Remember that, eh? Especially on the days you’re feeling less than your best!