Go back

Andrew Ng: The Biggest Opportunities in AI Aren't Where You Think

36m 15s

Andrew Ng: The Biggest Opportunities in AI Aren't Where You Think

Misinformation and fear-based narratives from leading AI companies have skewed public perception, creating unrealistic anxieties about job loss and AI control. Andrew emphasizes that AI will automate only 30–40% of tasks, elevating the value of human work—especially in areas requiring judgment, context, and emotional intelligence. Humans retain a critical advantage over AI due to years of experience and nuanced understanding, making them indispensable in complex decision-making. While AI lowers the barrier to entry for building tools and solutions, its misuse in education harms long-term learning and retention. The future job market demands broader, interdisciplinary skills, with professionals combining AI proficiency with deep domain knowledge to take on full-cycle roles. To remain competitive, individuals must proactively learn AI and adapt their skills, especially in software, marketing, and operations. Privacy concerns are valid, and using local, open-source models or avoiding data-sharing with untrusted platforms is a wise practice. Despite rapid progress, true artificial general intelligence remains far off, and real value in AI lies in practical productivity, not hype. Andrew urges individuals—especially students and new entrants—to embrace AI not as a threat but as a tool for innovation, learning, and building meaningful, customer-driven solutions. The key to thriving in the AI era is not avoiding technology, but mastering it with critical thinking, continuous learning, and human-centered judgment.

Transcription

6859 Words, 37378 Characters

English
- There's been a lot of misinformation about AI. - This is Andrew. He co-founded Google Brain and Coursera. His machine learning course has reached millions of learners and he is one of the most influential voices in AI today. - So, handful of leading AI companies have been very loud voices, fear-mongering around AI. To try to get regulations passed, does Trump be the fear-based messaging has skewed societal's perception to be within the next of our AI? - People have talked to me about data centers and job loss. - Maybe AI could do 30, 40% of many jobs. And what that means is, while that 60% that the human does, has become even more valuable. - What about loss of human control over AI? - I think about something else that we can't control. - I think you're one of the voices in AI who comes with a huge background and machine learning and teaching AI and also your your positive voice. 'Cause this is something that I've been seeing, especially this summer, how poor lives the society has become especially on social media when I'm posting about AI and people talk to me about data centers and job loss. Why do you think this wave started recently? What do you think the causes are? - There's been a lot of misinformation about AI and the root cause of a lot of this is an unfortunate attempt that started two, three years ago of I think PR and registry capture. It turns out that one of the most valuable things in AI right now is the giant AI models, giant large language models that some police have trained. But if you spend billions of dollars training model is really inconvenient. If someone else trains a model and wants to give it to anyone in the world to use for free. So a handful of leading AI companies, I think as you know, have been very loud voices fear-mongering around AI to try to get regulations passed, to create an unfair playing field that favors incumbents so that we all have to pay a high toll for use of AI while stymying the other teams via researchers or other companies that want to just give away open way to open source models that anyone could use much cheaper. Unfortunately, fear-mongering works. When you go and say AI is like nuclear weapons, which is an analogy that has no basis effect, what did they have to do with each other? Or when you go around and cherry-pick cases of AI, you're making a misstep and making it much bigger than it is. Or even spread misinformation about how AI uses data centers uses a lot more water than the actual reality. This drumbeat of fear-based messaging has skewed societal's perception to be really negative on AI, which is unfortunate because this is slowing down the American adoption in AI. This is making America less competitive. And unless we get the truth about AI out there, which is that it's fantastic benefit with some problems, but not nearly the degree to which they're blown up to be, it will offer it to individuals. I'm going to read out some of the problems that people are highlighting, job loss and inequality. What do you think? The job apocalypse, or job apocalypse, does idea that AI will take over 50% of jobs, people will be out of work, writing in the streets, that's just not going to happen. With every way for technology, including AI, the skills we need to do great work shifts, and so AI is changing job professions. But boy, I wish AI just doesn't work well enough. I know that handful of businesses want to hype up AI to say we have superintelligence, or we'll have artificial general intelligence, or whatever, and can do all the stuff that humans do. I wish AI worked better. We're just not good enough to make AI do everything a human does. And if you look at the analysis of jobs, economists, lemma friend Eric Brinnellson, Stanford, Andy McAfee at MIT, economists have analyzed many people's jobs and by break it down into individual tasks. And maybe AI could do 30%, 40% of many jobs. And what that means is, well, that 60% that the human does has become even more valuable, because it's called an economic compliment to the 30%, 40% is now cheaper. And so what will happen is people that use AI, maybe people that use AI will replace people that don't use AI. But AI is not in a position for the vast majority of jobs to replace people. Of all the different professions, the one that's most affected by AI now is software engineering, because AI is actually fantastic at writing code. And what we see is that the number of job openings in software engineering is up country to what the doom fear among us would say. AI is not actually able to replace software engineers, and all the good software engineers I know are busier than ever. Now, the flip side of it is, is someone still write code like this 2022 before a charity party? They're in trouble. They need new skills. Don't do stuff that 30%, 40% AI can automate. You've got to start doing that, let AI do that. But then gain your skills to do the other 60%, 70% AI cannot do. Well, would your advice be to new graduates? Because I talked to Eric on this podcast. And he was talking about that there is not really a lot of impact on the job market, except for-- I think he mentioned people from 18 to 25 who just graduated. What would be your advice to those people who don't have the expertise maybe just strategize in their job yet? They can only do manual work that AI can do as well. So one very challenge for fresh college drives is that the university system is slow to adapt. And so I love academia. I think we should also support academia at universities. And when AI comes and transforms the way software is written, universities often take like a year or two for the faculty to master the skills, then new causes, get curriculum committee approval, whatever, get the faculty senate to vote. It just takes years. And that speed of change in academia is very poorly matched. The speed of change in AI. So sadly, many universities are still teaching students to be ready for the jobs of 2022, when we shouldn't even be teaching them for the jobs of 2026 who should be teaching them for the jobs of 2028 and beyond. And what this means is the job opening is out there. Tons of employees I know just can't find enough skill of people at any level of seniority. But it turns out in my office right now, with a lot of interns, there are current college students, fresh college grad, well set one high school intern, and they're amazing and productive. But the key is they're all very AI native. They all use AI tools to do the things that I could do. But then also lean in to doing the things that humans can do that AI can't for a long time. So there's plenty of work for people to do. But so my advice to fresh college grads or to people currently in college is, by all means work hard in classes, good grades learn from the instructors. But to the extent that there are still additional skills that the university has not yet adapted to teaching, then find other ways to learn online. Be it from Coursera or deep learning.ai or Yudami or other places where you can gain the more cutting-ish skills, especially AI skills, that universities have not yet worked in the curriculum. I want to say one other thing, it turns out one, if look at the skill map changes, one of the most important changes is it's so much easier to build with AI than before. When something becomes much easier, a lot more people should do it. And so now, not only should professional software engineers build software with AI, it's becoming much easier for everyone to build with AI. And people that embrace that and do so will be more productive and will accomplish more. And I think have more fun than the ones that don't. And AI lets you build really fast. So for people that are not just software engineers, but marketers, recruiters, HR professionals, operation specialists, I think if they learn to build with AI, they really just do much more. What do you think the job role is? - How do you, by the way, measure the increase in productivity when you deploy AI? Do you have like a KPI in your company? - I wish a simple answer. I find that the business outcome of AI is more function of the business and the function of the AI. For some, it may be increase, you know, a customer growth and retention, or maybe a fastest serve customer. So it will increase accuracy in some tasks. So the KPI tends to be related to the business rather than the AI. - So you can't like directly measure just AI. 'Cause it's an interesting thing to do 'cause we've been deploying AI actively in my company. And I think for me as a media company, it's probably the amount of views, the output. It's just interesting how different people measure. Even revenue, like if you're becoming more effective with how you make money. - Actually, say more how you're using AI in your business. - Oh my God, I have the, so first of all, we have cloud for all of us. And we have certain projects for every social media that we're on. So for example, for this podcast, we have a project that's called Guests. And it knows all the analytics from previous guests. And it has certain criteria on which we rank every single person who comes to the podcast. Whether he's he or she's cited, whether they have a certain opinion on AI, whether they've been active, whether they are in their company or if they're a recent founder in AI. So it gives them different weights. And it comes up with a grade based out of 40, 40 meaning tier one, 30 meaning tier three, et cetera. And then we have another one that analyzes every single podcast and gives me tips on how to ask questions. Same for Instagram, same for LinkedIn. It has my ton of voice, personal dossier, my business strategy. So whenever it writes something, it knows all the facts about me, how I sound. Every social media is run by person. So a person makes a strategic call. And by the way, if you can give me feedback on this, if I can improve. So what I'm working on right now is closing the loop because sometimes they send me a text. And I'm like, oh, we need to change this, this, and that. But that happens in a chat and telegram. And we have this feedback. We have a bot that scans all of our chats. But I really want AI to be able to learn continuously from this feedback to just know my taste better. There's one thing I see a lot in AI, which is it turns out for AI status scientists or AI brain storming partner. It often comes up with one or two good ideas, two or three mediocre ones, and four atrocious ones. And sometimes you wonder, how can my AI have thought that could even be a plausible idea? And to me, this relates to the job apocalypse point of view, which is that for a long time, humans, you, me, everyone watching this, will have a significant context advantage over AI, which is that you know something. There's incredibly obvious to you that, you know, that was an awful idea. But the AI did not. And it turns out that one of the reasons why AI will not replace our jobs or whatever, our blood pressure has not been any time soon, is because humans have a massive context advantage compared to AI. We know so much that, you know, from a years of experience that we talked to customer, we saw the funny facial expression that told us, ah, they don't like this. Or we talked to business or, you know, our manager said, hey, blah, blah, I really care about this. And so it turns out that almost all humans, what made all humans, just know a lot of stuff that the plumbing does not exist. And I don't think it exists for the foreseeable future for AI to get. I know sometimes people talk about the importance of human judgments or human tastes. And some people wonder, all right, what is taste? Is this fuzzy thing? But to me, the technical thing that underlies why humans have, that the judgment of the taste and AI is this context advantage. And because this is a long-term advantage, like no one's going to solve this, you know, in a few years, this is why we just need a lot more humans with that judgment and taste to keep on complimenting the AI. And doesn't this make education even more important? Because education gives us context. It's another thing I'm hearing about AI, like you won't need education, because all the information is that you have fingertips, you just ask, chat GPT. But when you say context and taste, for me, that's years of acquiring knowledge and learning from the best and seeing how they perform versus just asking a chat. I'm going to say something that may be controversial. I don't have said this publicly, but I think it's true, which is, frankly, AI models are terrible for learning. I know people think AI is wonderful at getting things done. Use all the time, love it. But all the data that's coming out is that when say college students use AI, we know this. It's just a study is now back up as well. So we also have numbers. But the data is very clear. Students go higher on homeworks when they use AI. Yeah, higher homework schools. But retention, their long-term performance is much worse, because they're AI do the work for them. More and more studies are coming out to back this up now that I think people think, oh, it turns out-- I think Wikipedia is a wonderful tool. It's tons of facts. Web search is a wonderful tool. It's tons of facts. But it turns out that when you ask AI to do work for you, you are cognizant of offloading to AI, which is great, because that's how society moves forward and it gets where it's done. But human retention is much worse. It's just so clear that LMS, as they are most commonly used, are terrible for learning. I'm not saying there's no way to use it in a way that is good for learning. I think there are ways to use that are good for learning. But even for myself, there's so many things that are also AI model over the last six months or so. Building some project, how does this front-end back-end component work, whatever? Give me the answer, get the job done. It was fantastic. But six months later, I don't remember the answer. When I need to redo that front-end back-end component, I ask the AI again. So data is really clear. We should stop thinking of AI as helpful for learning. At least the vast majority of ways that the vast majority of people are using AI models today is absolutely terrible for learning. But you're building a company helping solve that, right? Because the one to one tutoring with AI is that where you just announced with 100 million investment programs in Grasera. Yes, so I'm excited about leading a new organization called Learn Vector. That is focus on building new learning experiences that is much more one-to-one than one-to-many. So 15 years ago, I was privileged to participate in the online causes movement that I think changed the way a lot of people learn. But that was, and so remains, largely a one-to-many experience where everyone kind of watched the same video. Which is actually OK, it actually works well. But the technology now exists to create much more personalized customized one-to-one experiences. And so our team is working on that. I think we'll have a lot more to show by early next year. When thinking about human skill development, I feel like because AI has so heavily impacted software engineering, what we see happening in the job market for software engineering is a hard beginner or is a forerunner of what we'll see in other disciplines as well. And in software engineering, people need to learn new skills. But when they do, they are thriving and creating more value and frankly getting raises and doing even more exciting projects. And what I've seen the early signs of in other disciplines as well, for example, in software engineering, most developers, like Franter and Backhand Developers, have now become full stack developers. Because of AI help, you could take on broader skill. I'm seeing early signs of this in other disciplines as well, where, for example, someone that did marketing coordination, coordinating marketing campaigns with AI help, they can now become more of a full cycle marketing, take on a broader skill. And I'm seeing frankly, sources in recruiting become more full cycle, do end-to-end recruiting. So now the good news and bad news is for people to step up to these broader roles, you do need to learn AI skills. But also it's not just learning AI. You also need to learn these other skills, like how do you do the other parts of marketing of recruiting or software engineering or AI engineering. So I think this actually creates a heavy need, a big need for people to gain new skills. But when they do, which is both AI skills, but also disciplinary skills, then they can do much more, hopefully have more fun, work on more exciting projects, hopefully get paid more as well. And one reason I kind of wear about the fear monitoring is I'm going to email from someone that was about to enter college. And he emailed me saying, hey, Andrew, taking online courses, been really struggling while I should major in college. Because in four years, while AI do all this, and everything I learn will be obsolete. And the answer is no, of course it won't all be obsolete. But when we keep on pushing these fear messages, we make people wonder if they will even be relevant. And it makes people not lean in to gain these skills. They'll put them in much better positions. So I see very clearly that these fear monitoring messages are distorting how many people, including high school students, college students, fresh drafts, think about the economy. And frankly, making people give up is one of the worst things we'll be doing in this era when people that lean in will thrive. - Andrew has stod over 8 million people AI. He started teaching machine learning online back in 2011, years before the current AI boom. Now one of the companies his building is focused on AI agents. From the way that it sounds, it can still feel way too technical. So I put together a step by step guide to building your first AI agent with no coding required. It walks you through what to automate, how to set it up, and how to make it actually useful. It is in my newsletter this week. The newsletter is called Future Proof. It's free. Link is in the description. What would you reply back to that email that somebody sent you? What would you say is the best major to study now? To thrive in AI era. Do you think it's like going deep into niche or just broader computer science so that you can acquire AI skills really fast? - You know, I don't know what's the best major. They're awful lot of great majors. It's like, I kind of feel like what's the best job in the world? It's like what's the best major in the world? - Oh, something that you love, right? - Yeah, my daughter wants to be an astronaut. I don't know if she can major in becoming an astronaut. I have to think about that. When she gets older, she may change her mind. I see so many opportunities across so many job roles. And it all seems very exciting to me. But do learn AI, do learn to build with AI. The other thing that my teams were working on the AI engineering skills map to try to map out, you know, the most important skills for AI engineering. One thing that I felt intuitively but I was surprised to see it show up in the data was that a lot more job descriptions seem to be saying that they want people that demonstrate a very high sense of agency. Because it turns out with AI, there are a lot more opportunities for individuals to spot problems and go build something or do something to go solve it. So I think we're really evolving, what we've long been evolving, but we're accelerating past the era where people just sit around and wait for the boss to tell them what to do. - This is what I've been feeling a lot, especially when we started doing remote work. I want people to be entrepreneurs within their niche. Like if you're helping me with LinkedIn, you're an entrepreneur there. You can hire more contractors, you can deploy different tools. You make the strategic decision whether this topic is good or not. So we proceed with it. I really think and tell me if you agree with me, we're moving into that job market where everyone is kind of independent in their workplace. - I think people will have much more autonomy and creativity. So I agree with that. And I'd even go one step further, which is I talk a lot of people is, you know, engineers and others in large companies that tell me that the manager tells them to stay in their swim lane. They'll say, "Oh, I have this creative idea." But the manager is, "No, initially focus on this one thing." Frankly, often because the manager's career defense, on it. But I feel like the number of opportunities for people to spot things outside their swim lane. And then in a responsible way, explore how they get it done, that feels very exciting to me. And I think that in the future, the businesses that serve a culture that encourage people to learn AI both fast, responsibly, talk to customers would drive a lot more value than the more hierarchical, silo organizations. Yeah, it starts with hiring the right people and then nurturing this in your organization. When you say, learn how to use AI and become proficient with AI, can you give me some benchmarks? Like, all the person who's, like, say, marketer, knowledge worker, advanced with AI, what are you looking for when you're interviewing this person? I'm pretty sure my team's ahead of the curve. All of my market is now highly code. So as part of how I interview market this, we also have what they've built. And if they have not built any software, if it's a dashboard is a good or bad? Like, is it too basic or a dashboard? Okay, my team's pretty, you know, somewhat ahead of the curve. But it's all the way. All of my market is built, much more sophisticated things in day. Like what? Oh, I feel like, I don't know, the other day, one of our, someone in marketing team was talking about the tools that he had built. So when he's considering writing an article on something, it will crawl the web, find related work, has a custom desktop app, actually build a desktop app that runs in this app. To highlight related articles for him, then you can chat to the whole system, navigate, you know, the thing he's writing as well as the related work and the other large dashboard for trawling the internet to highlight to him exciting things they're popping up. Now, even on my team, I think that marketer is ahead of the curve. But that's, that's great to hear any other interesting use cases that will inspire people to build something similar. Let's see, maybe my finance team uses AI extensively. So I think my, one of my CFOs realized that, you know, her team was spending hours every week clicking through documents, opened this copypaces number here. And so she started building automation scripts that runs on a routine that automatically opens files, checks wasn't there, checks with consistency, highlights, or a team if there's something, if there's something that needs to be paying attention to or for the new document that showed up. So I find that, rather than waiting around for an engineer to do the work for them, the team's ability to kind of not just build dashboards, but build kind of a data management infrastructure. They can just data alert them or something's happening. I think my finance and marketing teams are doing that. Oh, my recruiting team, well, we actually have recruiting engineers, which are really professional engineers that sit in a recruiting team that are building very sophisticated tools for recruiting. And this is actually the other trend. I think marketers recruiters, HR professionals, offspeople, should all learn AI. But the other thing is when you take an engineer and embed them in these teams, then that further accelerates what you can do. We do the same. We start with something basic, build it ourselves, then we hit the wall and engineer comes in, we build it further. Frankly, when you look at not just software engineers, but recruiting engineers, marketing engineers, HR engineers, I think there's so much valuable engineering work that can now be done. I'm just, you know, not worried about running out of, frankly, all my friends were so busy. We think, boy, how could we run out of engineering jobs? Yeah, there are so many cool ideas you can experiment on. But you touched up on something that is actually one of the fears when we talk about like financial information, how much you're giving to AI. So I gave my forvelexity permission to scan my fidelity account so it can track my portfolio, tell me when to rebalance. It doesn't do anything on my behalf, but it has access. Do you think there is any problem with that? This is complicated. I think AI privacy is a complex area. And it depends a lot on the company that you are sharing your data with. So for example, I trust all the hyperscalus to really 100% follow the terms of service and to do what they say. My personal opinion, not giving vehicle business advice, but I'd be shocked if, you know, the largest hyperscalus publish the terms of service with some privacy notice. And if they reach that, because that'd be not the culture, it'd be so damaging of the long-term business model. Now, that's on the largest hyperscalus site. If you look at AI company site, there's been, you know, at least one company that I will name that seems to occasionally change the terms of service and you're using it, you go to the website, say, pop up, hey, we changed the terms of service, the retain your data or train your data. And if you're paying attention and click the wrong button, then they suddenly gave themselves permission to access your data in the way that I'm not that comfortable with. I feel like I handle, you know, some sensitive information. So then I tend to be very careful with the businesses that I just don't feel the culture and the DNA and frankly, the long-term business model is as tight as protecting individual user privacy than the hyperscalus. And I see businesses, you know, get this as well. For example, one of my team's AI Spire will work with very large corporations, including banks with incredibly sensitive financial data. And as you imagine, AI Spire and the clients do not believe in the share, you know, really sensitive. I'm often a material non-public information, right? NMPI with frontier labs without really careful thinking about the guardrails in privacy. So I think it's complicated. So trusting hyperscalus, but also another thing that you can do, you can download an open source model and just run it on your computer and then it's just stays on your computer, right? Yes, I think, yes, it turns out a lot of the banks where she run the things in, you know, a virtual private call on prem. So they never even leaves their control. But I think for individuals, it's for the really sensitive things, I sometimes run a local model. And it's been interesting with the open-way models. So the latest open-way models are approaching frontier capability. And that are, you know, actually small enough. They're actually really good models now that they can run on them. Yeah, the one from Meta, right? The recent one. Oh, yes, Meta Muse is a good model. And I'm thinking also, the latest version of Quinn is also very good. But I think frankly, these models change every other weeks. I think that best practice is to not get stuck on one, but to keep on trying new models. So basically, when there is a situation that you don't trust anyone, you run a local model. And this is how you keep your data safe. I do trust the hyperscalus, but sometimes for, you know, literally NMPI, material of public information, that I won't even send that to the call so that either do it manually without AI help, or if I really need to use AI, then, you know, really carefully only use a local model. Interesting. Okay, this is, this is an interesting one. Okay, what about loss of human control over AI? Because I've talked to, I talked to Yosha Benja, who is very negative when it comes to open free AI without any regulation. And he painted me some very scary pictures of AI taking over control, because we basically, the whole scenarios, we can't control something that's smarter than us. And if AI gets smarter and smarter, where do we end up? What do you think about that? I think about something else that we can't control, which is some airplanes. No one can build an airplane that you can fly perfectly, winds will buff it to the ground. And then kind of the, in the early days of developing airplanes, some airplanes crash and people died, and it was tragic and awful. But through the early lessons learned, we then learned to control airplanes better and better, so that today, you know, we can mostly get in an airplane and not fear too much for lies. And it's really like that too of AI. No one can perfectly control AI, because it generates tokens or outputs, the little bit random, so we don't really know what exactly we'll do. But as we run them, and, you know, there's been a small number of mishaps on, which is unfortunate, and some number of mishaps have done some role damage. But the way we engineer almost any system from an airplane to electric circuits to now AI is carefully grow their capabilities, so that we can have a controlled environment in which the measure was wrong. And then to shape it, to make sure we can control it well enough, that it behaves responsibly and safely. And to this day, we can't perfectly control any airplane, and we will never perfectly control AI either. But I think we are certainly controlling them well enough that this loss of control doesn't feel like science. It feels like science fiction. Yeah, yeah. What about deepfakes? Deepfakes are problem. Well, one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen or heard of is non-consensual intimate deepfake imagery. I'm really glad that, you know, US Congress has been moving to, right, let's pause laws, get rid of that penalty, so that I'm just, I think there's some really problematic uses of AI that we should. Oh, Lord, heavily penalized. Let's just get rid of that. What do you think about children and social connection? When it comes to AI, with kids using more of AI, because we've seen social media, how, you know, there are people who are dumb-scrolling all day. And my daughter, who is five years old now, whenever I don't have an answer, he's like, "Ask Chad GPT." And like, who's that person? I'm like, I don't know. Ask Chad GPT. And like, she thinks Chad GPT knows everything. What would you say about, you know, kids' future with AI? First, I think kids of a bright future. It's such an exciting time to be child, to grow up in this environment with tools and none of us have had before. At the same time, we've seen that social media, I think social media has probably been blame a bit more than it deserves, but it does deserve blame, has kind of not been great for kids. I actually worry a lot about, is the one the full two, but AI damaging learning is something I worry a lot about. So it turns out of a five year on the seven year old, when I teach them math, just so young enough that I can basically, you know, not let them use the calculator, can say, how do you multiply these numbers? And I don't give them a calculator and practice that with them. But as they're a little bit older, I worry a lot about students using cognitive offloading to AI in a way that damages the long-term learning retention. But then at the same time, oh, I actually built an app. I did not like any of the, you know, free online learning type types of things. So I actually built my own to have my daughter learn to type. And I'm hoping that she's actually getting pretty decent now for a seven year old. Oh, she's having a really good time. Oh, yeah. She actually typed all the lower case letters. She's a little bit fit, you know, not a shift uppercase letter is a little bit, not quite there. But I think that this unlocks, you know, responsible adult supervised use of online tools. And I think it's really tricky, you know? I think adult supervised use of digital tools seems a great thing for kids. But too many adults don't have time to supervise the use of the tools and the incentives of, say, social media, right, to do funny things. Yeah. Has to be the right incentive when it comes to AI. Okay. We talked about the fears, we talked about how you can improve your work with AI. Can you name some of the biggest opportunities in AI in 2026 for people who want to build? A friend individual that wants to build, I don't think it's one size for us all, but because the cost of building has plummeted, I encourage people to learn AI, build fast and talk to customers. I find myself building things, I don't know, every week, every weekend, because I or someone on our team were some problem and some idea for building some AI thing to automate it. Last weekend, I had, really, I was using a frontier model to analyze a lot of our key business metrics because I didn't have time to do it myself, but it was kind of measuring, you know, demonized key business metrics. And I didn't have time to go find a data scientist to go work me on it. So I just did a variety of frontier models, being really careful on their data retention policies. I did not use models with data attention, but I don't like in order to analyze data. But and then I find that what's happened to AI is the cost of building us plummeted. And so the challenge is shifting to deciding what to build, which I was calling, which I've been calling the product management bottleneck. And so people, you know, founders, engineers, product managers, they can talk to customers, they have a sense for the taste of judgment on what to build and a bill of AI and iterate quickly. I think that's just a ton of exciting things. And you've been starting so many companies, you're like, when I looked at your portfolio, do you think for beginners, when you said you built something during the weekend, how do you decide what to focus on or you can pursue multiple ideas because of AI now? And you can just be, you know, playing in different companies at the same time. It turns out building a company is still really, really hard. And so there's a lot to be said for a single-threaded leadership or someone that's fully focused on just one thing. I find that, you know, over a weekend, I can often build an own wrapper, build a simple application. But I wish it was that easy to build a large company. I find that building something meaningful often takes either road technical death or and or deep customer insight and integration of customers. Yes, we can now, you know, use AI to code something in a few hours, but that's a small piece of the puzzle. So spending time understanding the technical complexity and building the really complex software that takes us like months, you know, maybe years or having that deep customer insight to decide what to build. That also just takes a lot. Talking to people, reading facial expressions, surveys doing that over and over until we figure what to build. And so I think sometimes there's a lot of value to sampling widely, but then having that focus for an individual to go really deep in the couple sectors that still seems important for building a business. My last question, I know we don't have much time, but I wanted to ask about AI just because people use this word so much and some people say, I think Jensen Huang said, we already reached AI. You said, it's decades away, what's the one criteria when you're going to say we reach AI? So, different people say we reach AI at different times because of different definitions for the AI. What's efficient and almost familiar with is AI that could do any intellectual tasks that the human can. But so the human brain can take, say, five years to study and do a PhD thesis or and so can AI write a PhD thesis or a human can learn to drive a truck through a dense rainforest with your tens of minutes of practice. So when can AI do that to drive a new environment with tens of minutes of practice? I feel like there's a long list of these things that AI cannot do for what fused me decades. I hope it's only decades, maybe it turned out to be longer. So that's what I think for that definition of AI or AGI, AGI is still very far away. But it turns out because of, you know, economic incentives, I think Open and Microsoft had an agreement. Does that actually been really good now? So that's gone away. But Open AI had economic incentive to try to declare reaching AGI earlier. And so it turns out that if you come up with other definitions of AI, depending on how far you lower the bar, then you could totally have reached AGI, you know, already or even 30 years ago, depending on how you wanted to find it. Yeah, true. Andrew, thank you so much for this positive conversation, very applicable. I like when you watch something and then you go and you measure yourself against what people are doing with AI, look at your process and maybe expand it. So thank you so much for showing what your team is doing and thank you for your insights. Yeah. I think given the huge benefit of AI to come, I hope, where we're watching this is motivated to really go learn AI, apply it and even to go build something.

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. Misinformation and fear-mongering by major AI companies have distorted public perception, leading to exaggerated concerns about job loss and AI risks.
  2. AI is unlikely to replace 50% of jobs; instead, it automates 30–40% of tasks, making the remaining 60–70% of human work more valuable and specialized.
  3. Humans retain a significant "context advantage" over AI due to years of experience and emotional intuition, which AI currently cannot replicate—this ensures human irreplaceability in judgment and decision-making.
  4. Education and skill development are more critical than ever, as AI enables faster, more accessible innovation, but misuse of AI for learning harms long-term retention and deep understanding.
  5. The job market is shifting toward broader, interdisciplinary roles—like full-cycle marketing or recruiting—where professionals must master both AI tools and core domain expertise.
  6. Open-source and local AI models offer privacy and control, especially for sensitive data, and are essential for individuals who distrust centralized AI platforms.
  7. AI development is accelerating, but building meaningful products still requires deep customer insight, technical complexity, and focused effort—not just rapid prototyping.
  8. True AI advancement—especially general intelligence (AGI)—is still decades away; current progress is better measured by practical tools and productivity gains than by hype or declarations of AGI.

Summary:

Misinformation and fear-based narratives from leading AI companies have skewed public perception, creating unrealistic anxieties about job loss and AI control. Andrew emphasizes that AI will automate only 30–40% of tasks, elevating the value of human work—especially in areas requiring judgment, context, and emotional intelligence. Humans retain a critical advantage over AI due to years of experience and nuanced understanding, making them indispensable in complex decision-making.

While AI lowers the barrier to entry for building tools and solutions, its misuse in education harms long-term learning and retention. The future job market demands broader, interdisciplinary skills, with professionals combining AI proficiency with deep domain knowledge to take on full-cycle roles. To remain competitive, individuals must proactively learn AI and adapt their skills, especially in software, marketing, and operations.

Privacy concerns are valid, and using local, open-source models or avoiding data-sharing with untrusted platforms is a wise practice. Despite rapid progress, true artificial general intelligence remains far off, and real value in AI lies in practical productivity, not hype. Andrew urges individuals—especially students and new entrants—to embrace AI not as a threat but as a tool for innovation, learning, and building meaningful, customer-driven solutions.

The key to thriving in the AI era is not avoiding technology, but mastering it with critical thinking, continuous learning, and human-centered judgment.

FAQs

No, AI won't replace 50% of jobs. Instead, it will automate 30-40% of tasks, making the remaining 60-70% of human work more valuable. Jobs will evolve, not disappear, as people focus on tasks that require creativity, judgment, and context—areas where humans still outperform AI.

The fear is largely driven by PR and regulatory efforts by a few large AI companies. They've used exaggerated, often misleading claims—like AI being as dangerous as nuclear weapons—to push for regulations. This fear-based messaging has distorted public perception and slowed AI adoption in the U.S.

No, AI is already transforming software engineering by automating code generation, but it cannot replace human engineers. In fact, software engineering demand is rising, and experienced engineers are busier than ever, as AI helps them build faster and more efficiently.

New graduates should learn AI tools and how to build with AI, while also developing domain-specific skills. Universities are slow to update curricula, so self-directed learning through platforms like Coursera or DeepLearning.ai is essential for staying relevant in a rapidly changing job market.

Using AI to complete homework or tasks leads to better short-term results but poor long-term retention. Education should focus on developing critical thinking and context-based judgment. AI is a tool, not a substitute for learning; human experience and understanding remain crucial.

Humans have a 'context advantage'—years of experience, emotional intelligence, and real-world observations that AI lacks. This allows humans to detect subtle cues, like a customer's facial expression, that AI cannot interpret, making human judgment far more reliable in complex situations.

Chat with AI

Loading...

Pro features

Go deeper with this episode

Unlock creator-grade tools that turn any transcript into show notes and subtitle files.