AI is taking over the painstaking work of Silicon Valley's most-coveted engineers

CUDA inventor Ian Buck, vice president of hyperscale and high-performance computing at Nvidia. GTC CUDA engineers are elite coders who squeeze speed out of Nvidia's chips. AI is reshaping the job as demand for scarce expertise continues to grow. AI could soon write CUDA code that humans can verify but not fully understand. For years, CUDA engineers who optimize Nvidia chips have been among tech's most sought-after specialists. Now, they're increasingly managing AI that does it for them. These engineers specialize in using Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) — Nvidia's software for programming its AI chips, known as GPUs — to write code that can run AI as efficiently as possible. The jobs are coveted because compute costs are massive; engineers who can squeeze the most value from a chip can save companies millions.