A hot potato: Jensen Huang has made plenty of headlines over his comments about coding and how young people don't need to learn the skill due to generative AI. The Nvidia CEO was recently asked if he still felt this way, to which he answered: "Programming is not going to be essential for you to be a successful person."
Speaking at the World Government Summit in Dubai last month, Huang said that generative AI has made the need to learn programming redundant, and humans, children in particular, should instead focus on more important skills such as biology, education, manufacturing, or farming. Huang was essentially repeating what he said a year earlier, that "Literally everyone can program a computer" thanks to ChatGPT.
"Coding" was never the source of value, and people shouldn't get overly attached to it. Problem solving is the core skill. The discipline and precision demanded by traditional programming will remain valuable transferable attributes, but they won't be a barrier to entry.
– John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) February 26, 2024
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At Nvidia's GTC 2024 event where it unveiled the new Blackwell GPU platform that will further advance AI development, Huang was again asked if programming skills will remain relevant in the age of generative AI prompts.
"I think that people ought to learn all kinds of skills," Huang said. He compared learning code to skills such as juggling, playing piano, or learning calculus, but added that "programming is not going to be essential for you to be a successful person."
Huang also said that "if somebody wants to learn to do so [program], please do - because we're hiring programmers."
The Nvidia boss added that generative AI is closing the "technology divide."
"You don't have to be a C++ programmer to be successful," he said. "You just have to be a prompt engineer. And who can't be a prompt engineer? When my wife talks to me, she's prompt engineering me. We all need to learn how to prompt AIs, but that's no different than learning how to prompt teammates."
Huang's suggestion that people might be better off learning to become prompt engineers rather than coding is a contentious one. Generative AI isn't known for producing elegant code on the same level as an expert human programmer, as highlighted by a study from Purdue University from last year, which found that ChatGPT got more than half the programming questions wrong. And we've long heard claims of new technologies that will kill a certain field, but they've ended up being used alongside traditional methods.
Huang emphasized last month that it is important for people to learn how to use generative AI. "It is vital that we upskill everyone, and the upskilling process I believe will be delightful, surprising," he said.
It's hard to view Huang as unbiased on this topic. Nvidia has become the third largest company in the world by market cap ($2.26 trillion) thanks to it controlling around 80% of the high-end AI hardware market. The Blackwell lineup that includes the B200 GPU and GB200 Grace superchip will no doubt help cement Nvidia's position as the dominant force in the industry. Team Green's success has also made Huang the 20th richest person in the world with a total net worth of just under $80 billion.
https://www.techspot.com/news/102345-jensen-huang-generative-ai-successful-person-doesnt-depend.html
