The co-founder of Valve Corporation, Gabe Newell, recently gave an interview to YouTuber Zalkar Saliev. The ocean-going billionaire shares his thoughts on everything from his daily routine to startup culture, but one of the largest themes is AI: and the “funny situation” Newell foresees whereby people who can’t code become “more effective developers of value” than those who’ve been coding for a decade.
In a new short, Newell returns to AI after being asked what advice he’d offer to young people hoping for success in their careers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Newell believes that LLM tools are the next great technological leap, and are going to prove so transformative that this is where people should focus their learning.
“Well I think [in terms of] significant technology transitions there was pre-computer and there was post-computer, there was pre-internet and then there was post-internet,” says Newell. “I think it’s incredibly obvious that machine learning systems, AI systems, are going to profoundly impact pretty much every single business.
“So if I had to point to a technology transition to get in front of, it’s to figure out how to use AI to do anything better. If you wanna be an accountant, learn AI, if you want to be an attorney, learn AI, if you’re gonna be a programmer, you know, make sure that you know how to use the tools that are comfortable with those programming concepts. That all seems super obvious.”
Rather than focusing on the high-falutin’ side of AI, however, Newell compares this to past innovations in software like Lotus 1-2-3, which may not be a household name these days but was the first fully featured spreadsheet software to find widespread success, and was considered the first “killer app” for IBM PCs.
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“There are a lot of people who are incredibly successful simply because they were the first person in finance at their company to learn how to use Lotus 1-2-3,” says Newell. “Everybody else was still doing accounting in traditional ways, and you could look like a super genius just because you know how to use a desktop computer and a spreadsheet, right?
“Similarly on the internet there were the companies and individuals who saw the opportunity and took advantage of those opportunities to create more value either as an individual or as a corporation and they zoomed ahead of everybody else. So essentially AI is going to be a cheat code for people who want to take advantage of it.”
It is worth the cautionary note that this is a field rife with promises and unproven use-cases, and in some scenarios AI seems to create more problems than it solves. The technology is here to stay, of course, but we’ve been hearing about how transformative it’s going to be for many years now, and… yeah, we’ll see. But Newell is both a genius and one of the most successful businessmen on the planet, so no doubt this latest pronouncement will have plenty rushing off to work out how AI is going to help them become a better lawyer.