Nvidia CEO: 'You don't need to learn programming, you should learn to give orders to AI'

At the GTC 2024 conference taking place this week in California, Mr. Huang was asked to elaborate on the idea that young people should not learn to code – advice he gave at an event in late February.

This time, he still maintained his opinion. “I think people can learn all kinds of skills,” he said, comparing learning to code to skills like juggling, playing the piano or learning calculus. “Programming is not something you need to become successful. But if someone wants to learn, learn because we are recruiting programmers.”

According to Nvidia’s founder, an engineer who wants to be successful doesn’t have to become a C++ programmer, but instead just needs to become a command engineer . Giving orders to AI is similar to people reminding each other to do work.

“And everyone can become a command engineer. When my wife talks to me, she is also a ‘command engineer’ for me,” Huang said.

At a February event in Dubai, Jensen Huang shocked everyone when he said young people should not learn programming, going against the views of most previous technology CEOs. According to him, humans are in the early stages of the AI revolution and programming is no longer an important skill. He believes that artificial intelligence is doing this job better and better, so people should focus on more valuable expertise such as biology, education, manufacturing or agriculture.

This viewpoint received many mixed opinions. Tom’s Hardware quoted technology analyst Patrick Moorhead as saying that Jensen Huang’s advice was given too early. “For over 30 years, I’ve been hearing ‘xyz is going to kill coding,’ but we still don’t have enough programmers,” Moorhead said.

Meanwhile, some technology leaders share Huang’s opinion. Matthew Candy, IBM’s AI Director, said in January that artificial intelligence will help people without computer skills develop software products themselves. In the future, people just need to describe their ideas, and AI will quickly program, create and test that product. By mid-2023, Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI, even predicts there will be no more programmers in the next 5 years.

In early March, Cognition Labs successfully developed an AI software engineer named Devin , who can program himself and operate independently when assigned tasks, bringing this vision closer and closer.

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