The ‘godfather of AI’ says now isn’t the time to give up on computer science degrees — even if AI is changing the coding industry.
“Many people think a CS degree is just programming or something,” AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton told Business Insider. “Obviously, just being a competent mid-level programmer is not going to be a career for much longer, because AI can do that.”
Hinton said the value of a CS degree is much more than just coding, which is why he thinks a “CS degree will be valuable for quite a long time.”
Hinton’s view dovetails with that of other leading names in AI and tech, who say it’s too early to declare the CS degree a casualty of the AI boom, even as agentic AI disrupts the job market for what was once a highly sought-after degree.
OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor, who holds a BS and MS in computer science from Stanford University, said earlier this year that a CS degree is “extremely valuable.”
“There’s a lot more to coding than writing the code,” he said. “Computer science is a wonderful major to learn systems thinking.”
That doesn’t mean CS programs shouldn’t adapt.
Sameer Samat, Google’s head of Android, previously told Business Insider that CS needed to be reframed around “the science, in my opinion, of solving problems.”
And UC Berkeley professor Hany Farid told us that the best jobs for CS graduates right now are not at “the usual suspects in Silicon Valley.”
“I have always contended that the most exciting applications of computer science are not at Facebook, Google, and Amazon, but at the intersection of computing and other fields like: computational drug discovery, medial imaging, computational neuroscience, computational finance, digital humanities including art and music, computational social science, policy, etc,” Farid said September.
Hinton’s advice for middle and high school students
Hinton is also a strong believer in the benefits young students receive from learning to code, another point of contention for some in tech, as AI models become increasingly adept at vibe coding.
“Some time ago, it was both sort of a good intellectual activity and useful for getting a job. It’s still a good intellectual activity,” he said.
Learning to code, Hinton said, is a bit like learning Latin as part of a broad-based humanities education.
“I think it’s very useful to learn to code and even if they end up not having AI do all the coding for them,” he said. “I think learning to code is, it is maybe a bit like learning Latin is if you’re in the humanities or something, you’re never going to speak Latin, but it’s still useful learning Latin.”
Overall, Hinton’s advice for students aiming to become high-level AI researchers or engineers is to focus on upping their critical thinking rather than any one specific skill, which could be replaced by AI.
“Some skills that are always going to be valuable, like knowing some math, and some statistics, and some probability theory, knowing things like linear algebra that will always be valuable,” he said. “That’s not knowledge that’s going to disappear.”
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