Gabe Newell, the head of Valve, believes that people who can’t program will become more valuable developers than those who have been programming for a decade.

Newell, Valve’s co-founder, recently gave an interview to YouTuber Zalkar Saliev. We’ve only seen snippets of the interview, but we’ve learned about Newell’s daily routine (wake up, work, dive) and his opinion on startups chasing venture capital money. Artificial intelligence was also a topic of the interview. It is a promising field with the end goal of creating artificial general intelligence (AGI), but there is little consensus on the best current use cases for the technology.

Some argue that large language models (LLMs) will soon replace human programmers. Others rightly point out that LLM code is often riddled with bugs and requires so much human supervision that it can be counterproductive. Should younger people interested in this area learn the technical side, or should they focus on how to best use the tools?

“I think it’s both. The more you understand what underlies these current tools, the more effective you are at taking advantage of them. However, I think we’ll be in a strange situation where people who don’t know how to program but use AI to improve their programming skills will become more effective developers than people who have been programming for a decade. Even if you’re just a tool user, you’ll find that the benefits of using those tools are substantial. However, your ability to use these tools will improve the more you understand the methods and mindsets of people who develop machine learning systems. So, I think it’s both, and they’re highly complementary,” said Newell.

Newell emphasizes that this is not an either-or proposition and that all users should be able to benefit from AI. However, to truly reap the benefits of this technology, we must understand what lies behind it. Unsurprisingly, Newell has a generally positive attitude toward AI. He loves new technologies and has worked with Valve in various technical areas, some of which were successful and some of which were not. He also co-founded a company called Starfish Neuroscience, which focuses on neural interfaces.

Source: PCGamer