Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has some advice, and he says that nearly everyone would benefit by following it: Get an AI tutor.

“I have a personal [artificial intelligence] tutor with me all of the time. And I think that feeling should be universal,” Huang told journalist Cleo Abram’s YouTube interview show “Huge Conversations,” in an episode that aired last month.

That’s a virtual tutor powered by AI, not a human who can teach you how to use AI more effectively. “If there’s one thing I would encourage everybody to do, [it’s] to go get yourself an AI tutor right away,” said Huang, whose company makes computer chips that have helped power recent AI tech advances.

Huang’s preferred tutor is Perplexity’s AI-powered search engine, which he called a “really helpful” tool in an interview with the Bipartisan Policy Center last year. He uses it daily to learn about a multitude of subjects, including digital biology, he added. The search engine, like many other generative AI tools, offers users both free and paid subscription options.

Other AI platforms are designed to act more specifically as tutors, like free tutoring service Sizzle and Khan Academy’s Khanmigo AI tutor, which costs $4 per month.

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″[AI programs can] teach you things — anything you like — help you program, help you write, help you analyze, help you think, help you reason,” Huang told Abram. “All of those things [are] going to really make you feel empowered and I think that’s going to be our future.”

AI tools come with caveats. They still frequently make factual errors, and experts say you should only use them to help your work — not to do your work for you. Huang uses his favorite AI tools to write the first drafts of his own work, he said at a Wired event last year.

He’s hopeful, however, that within the next 10 years, the technology will help most people learn more easily and quickly in nearly every kind of daily setting, he told Abram.

“I think that [in] the next decade, intelligence — not for everything, but for some things — would basically become superhuman,” said Huang, adding: “We’re going to become superhumans — not because we have super[powers]. We’re going to become superhumans because we have super AIs.”

Huang does have a vested interest in preaching AI’s value, and the technology’s growing popularity could be a double-edged sword. Roughly 75% of Americans worry that the tech will eventually result in fewer jobs for humans, according to an August 2024 Gallup survey. AI could automate roughly half of all human “work activities” by 2030 at the earliest, according to a 2023 study from consulting group McKinsey.

AI will indeed help employees do their jobs more efficiently, but it’ll be a temporary boon, current Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman wrote in his 2023 book “The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma.”

“They will make us smarter and more efficient for a time, and will unlock enormous amounts of economic growth, but they are fundamentally labor replacing,” he wrote, adding that AI’s spread “will be hugely destabilizing for hundreds of millions who will, at the very least, need to re-skill and transition to new types of work.”

Perhaps predictably, Huang disagrees. As Nvidia’s CEO, he’s surrounded by thousands of smart employees, “and yet it never one day caused me to think, all of a sudden, ‘I’m no longer necessary,’” he said. It “actually empowers me and gives me the confidence to go tackle more and more ambitious things.”

The same logic applies to AI, he said: “Suppose now everybody is surrounded by these super AIs that are very good at specific things … What would that make you feel? Well, it’s going to empower you. It’s going to make you feel confident.”

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Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett isn’t afraid to admit when he, or his company, has messed up.

Mistakes are inevitable — and once you realize you’ve made one, you should own it quickly to prevent additional damage, Buffett wrote in his annual letter to shareholders, published this past weekend. He learned that lesson from his longtime business partner and friend, the late Charlie Munger, he noted.

“The cardinal sin is delaying the correction of mistakes or what Charlie Munger called ‘thumb-sucking,’” wrote Buffett. “Problems, he would tell me, cannot be wished away. They require action, however uncomfortable that may be.”

Buffett used the words “mistake” and “error” 16 times in his annual letters from 2019 through 2023, he noted in this year’s communication. Those missteps ranged from incorrectly assessing job candidates and economic trends to investing in the wrong companies.

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Most of his errors at Berkshire Hathaway stemmed from reluctance, Buffett said at the company’s annual conference in 1997: He’d missed opportunities to invest in exciting new companies because they’d asked for too much money.

“The cost of that [has been] many, many billions,” said Buffett. And given the company’s cautious investing strategies, “I’ll probably keep making that mistake.”

Munger made his stance on mistake-making clear at a Wesco Financial Corporation meeting in 2016: You shouldn’t dwell on past errors, but you should reflect on them to avoid repeating them.

“Nobody bats a thousand,” Munger said. “I think it’s important to review your past stupidities so you are less likely to repeat them, but I’m not gnashing my teeth over it or suffering or enduring it.”

Fessing up to an error can build trust among colleagues, because it shows emotional intelligence and humility, communication expert Matt Abrahams told CNBC Make It last year. It can make your peers feel more comfortable admitting when they need help too, prompting more teamwork and collaboration.

Early into his career at Amazon, now-CEO Andy Jassy presented a 220-slide PowerPoint on his team’s operating plan to founder Jeff Bezos and other company executives, Jassy said in a video posted online by Amazon last year. Partway through the presentation, Bezos noted that one slide was full of errors.

Jassy decided to show humility rather than defensiveness: He apologized, acknowledged the error, then moved on without dwelling on it. “If you want to earn trust: If you say you’ve got something, deliver it. If you own something and it’s not going well, be self-critical, and fix it,” Jassy said in the video.

The good news for Buffett: His correct decisions over the course of his Berkshire Hathaway tenure seem to have mattered more than his wrong ones, he wrote in this year’s letter.

“Our experience is that a single winning decision can make a breathtaking difference over time,” he wrote, citing Berkshire Hathaway’s purchase of insurance giant Geico, the hiring of vice president of insurance operations Ajit Jain and “my luck in finding Charlie Munger as a one-of-a-kind partner, personal advisor and steadfast friend.”

“Mistakes fade away; winners can forever blossom,” Buffett added.

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David Royce has hired many people over the course of his two-decade career. The serial entrepreneur has founded or co-founded three companies in the pest control industry, including his most recent, Aptive Environmental, which he co-founded in 2015 and now has locations in more than 5,000 cities, according to LinkedIn. A private equity firm acquired a major stake in the company in 2024 and Royce is currently taking a sabbatical year to consider what he wants to do next.

When it comes to interviewing job candidates, Royce considers characteristics like “are they compelling?” he says. “Can they be passionate? And can they transfer that energy to motivate me to want to be around that person?”

There are also a couple of red flags he looks out for. Here’s what makes him question a candidate’s viability.

There are plenty of reasons why someone might leave a job in under a year: they might receive a better offer, or find their work environment to be toxic. In the last few years, labor market volatility and mass layoffs in industries like tech have additionally dropped many workers back into the job search unexpectedly.

But there’s a limit to how many short stints a candidate can exhibit.

“If every job only lasts six to 12 months” in their past, he says, that’s too much. It makes him wonder if this person gets bored easily or if they never jell with their teammates. It also makes him wonder how long that person will last in his own company.

“You probably can expect about that same amount of longevity with your own firm,” he says, which will mean having to go through the interview process again soon thereafter.

Royce also pays attention to how candidates talk about their previous employers.

“It’s totally okay to have both positive and negative things” to say about an employer, he says. But if the candidate is emphatically leaning into the negative aspects of their previous jobs “then the problem is likely the employee,” he says.  

Those kinds of people can bring down the morale of the whole team. They can “spoil your culture and then potentially force out the best talent,” he says.

When hiring, “I want to make sure somebody is generally positive,” he says, “looking for opportunities or ways to improve.” That’s the kind of employee that can succeed and help the company move forward.

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Emma Knight always wanted to write for a living, “but I didn’t think that was a viable option,” she says.

The 36-year-old Toronto native spent her 20s getting a bachelor’s in languages in Scotland and a master’s in international affairs and journalism in France. Throughout both she contributed to publications like International Herald Tribune and co-wrote screenplays with her then-boyfriend, now husband, Anthony Green.

In 2014, Knight and her husband co-founded a cold-pressed juice company, Greenhouse, with a number of their friends in Toronto. The company’s products were immediately a hit and Greenhouse has continued to grow over the years, with Knight’s husband ultimately taking on the CEO role and Knight filling various roles, including director of brand and marketing.

Even while at Greenhouse, Knight found pathways to her passion, like co-writing and publishing two cookbooks, one in 2017 and one in 2021. She quit the company when she got a book deal for her first novel, “The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus,” in 2023, she says. The book was released in January 2025 and has since become a New York Times bestseller and a Read with Jenna book club pick on NBC’s “TODAY”. It’s also in development to become a TV series, according to a recent report by Variety.

Here’s how Knight built her writerly career.

CNBC Make It: How did your first cookbook, “The Greenhouse Cookbook,” come into play? It became a national bestseller in Canada.

Knight: We had zero money and zero marketing team to speak of, but we did have really interesting people in our stores who were selling the juice alongside me, some of them nutritionists. And so we created a blog, which, at the time, was called Terrarium, and we filled it with plant-based recipes. And someone from Penguin Canada, Andrea Magyar, noticed the blog. She was a customer and she said, “Hey, have you ever thought about a book?” And I said, “Well, now I am.”

How did your second cookbook happen, “How to Eat With One Hand”?

After our first daughter was born, [co-author Christine Flynn and] I came up with another cookbook idea for how you eat with one hand. [She is] a chef who was at the time a single mother of twins. We would just be texting back and forth late at night about how hungry we were with these little people and how hard it was to feed ourselves properly during this very peculiar time.

And so “How to Eat with One Hand” was a collection of essays that were meant to be a very raw and candid and not yummy-mummy Instagram version of what motherhood really was, so that someone might read them and feel less alone, while also giving useful, easy recipes for the different stages of early parenthood.

When did you start working on “The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus”?

I’ve always written just for me and on the side, just at night and whenever I have time.

In the summer of 2019, I started hearing these characters talk, and I would write down this dialogue. And then I started writing letters to and from this mysterious person called Lord Elliot Lennox, [a character in the book]. That was just his name and I didn’t know that much about him. I was curious about what was going on in my own brain, so I just kind of wrote it.

It was during the writing of that book that you realized you needed to step back from your duties at Greenhouse and pursue writing full-time. How did that come about?

[When our second daughter, Frida,] was born in September 2020 there was a spike of Covid happening. I had some postpartum complications that landed me in an isolation room in the hospital for a number of days without her. And it was scary. I started writing this long journalistic piece about maternal health.

I think that experience jolted me and made me realize that writing was what I needed to do and is who I am, and that in order to properly show these two little people that they can do whatever they want eventually, that I would need to be a little bit braver in terms of embracing what it was that I wanted to do.

I was able to have conversations with Anthony and to kind of scale back my time. First it was one day a week of not doing Greenhouse and writing [beginning in 2021]. And then it moved to 50/50, and then I moved to just one day a week of Greenhouse. When I had publishers and I was in the editing process, then I fully stepped back from Greenhouse in June 2023.

Was it difficult to let go of that financial safety net?

Cutting myself off from gainful employment with two small children was terrifying.

I was very scared to jump into the abyss and I have been lucky so far that it has not been ruinous. And that doesn’t mean that it won’t be in the future. But I think, one, it’s worth it. I love it enough. And two, I’m just really lucky that we can pull it off.

The Canadian maternity and parental leave system is generous in terms of the amount of time you can spend on leave, but you do take a pay cut.

It had already happened a couple of times, and I had already been through the kind of stop-going-to-coffee-shops-and-don’t-go-out-for-lunch and recognizing the ways in which you can’t waste your resources when you’re not earning. I understand those are very tiny sacrifices overall, we are in a very privileged position.

Do you feel like you’ve made it?

Oh my goodness, no!

[During the first lockdown, my daughter] asked me what kind of job she should have when she grows up. It took me a while to figure out how to answer her. The answer I finally gave was that she should do something that makes her feel like herself and that she will always want to get better at. This is what writing is for me. It was not long after telling her that that I committed (in my own mind) to finishing a novel.

I will always know that there is room to get better, and so I do not imagine that I will ever think I’ve made it. I’m happy about this. I think it means I’ve found the right work.

Do you have advice for people who want to find success as writers?

Just keeping at it, sitting in the chair and doing it every day, even if some days you know that it’s bad. Because it’s an endurance game.

Taking time in life that otherwise goes to things like drinking wine with dinner so that you can’t work after dinner or watching lots of Netflix [is also important] … I basically didn’t have a social life, I’d say for, like, five years. I sort of gave up on all the bits of life that are extra and spent that time writing.

And if you’re really serious and you really want it, then if you can find those margins of your life — and I know it feels like they don’t exist, especially with small children … finding those pockets of time that you didn’t know you had and identifying them and committing to using them for this is one method.

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Most couples think they know each other well, but real intimacy is a lot more than just being able to name your partner’s favorite food or TV shows.

As a psychologist, I’ve found that people in the happiest, most successful relationships see in their partner what others can’t or would normally overlook.

If you can answer these five questions below about your partner, your relationship is built on a highly coveted level of understanding and connection. (And if you don’t know the answers? It’s the perfect excuse to start asking.)

We all have those moments that stick with us for life — something a high school teacher said in passing, a compliment from a stranger or a minor rejection that still stings years later.

These events might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but they can radically alter the way we see ourselves, and they rarely come up in casual conversation.

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If you know about one of these small core memories in your partner’s life, it means you’ve had the kind of deep conversations that reveal the invisible threads of their personhood.

When life gets hectic, everyone has their own way of mentally checking out. Some fantasize about quitting their job and moving to a remote island. Others scroll real estate listings for cities they’ll never move to, or envision alternate versions of their life.

This is so much more than just a quirky habit; it’s a window into how your partner copes with stress. If you know the answer, it means you understand their inner workings, and that’s a rare kind of closeness.

We all have social scenarios that make us feel uneasy. Maybe your partner dreads small talk at parties, or they hate ordering at a restaurant in a group setting.

Knowing what makes your partner uncomfortable means you can be a source of support in situations where they might otherwise just grin and bear it. This is a sign that you’re truly attuned to their subtle mood changes — something that the untrained eye wouldn’t notice.

Whether we like it or not, we inherit certain habits from our upbringing — some good, some bad. For example, maybe your partner has a hard time accepting compliments because they never got any growing up.

If you know what habit your partner struggles with, it means you’ve had the vulnerable conversations about the family dynamics that shaped them into who they are today. These are the kinds of details most people don’t get the chance to learn, or simply don’t care to.

Everyone has accomplishments that they’re secretly proud of, but refrain from announcing to the world.

Maybe your partner once helped a stranger in a way that changed their life, or they pushed through a health, family or finance-related struggle that no one knows about. 

If you know about any of their unsung victories, it means your partner feels safe enough to share their most humble, meaningful moments with you. That kind of trust is invaluable in a relationship.

Mark Travers, PhD, is a psychologist who specializes in relationships. He holds degrees from Cornell University and the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the lead psychologist at Awake Therapy, a telehealth company that provides online psychotherapy, counseling and coaching. He is also the curator of the popular mental health and wellness website, Therapytips.org.

Want to up your AI skills and be more productive? Take CNBC’s new online course How to Use AI to Be More Successful at Work. Expert instructors will teach you how to get started, practical uses, tips for effective prompt-writing, and mistakes to avoid.