NVIDIA CEO says the future of coding as a career might already be dead in the water with the imminent prevalence of AI

What you need to know

• While at the World Government Summit in Dubai, NVIDIA's CEO stated that coding is no longer a viable career for the young generation who might want to venture into tech with the rapid growth and adoption of AI across every sector.

• He recommended that they should lean more toward biology, education, manufacturing, or farming instead.

• The CEO added that upskilling might help some professionals in the coding landscape retain their relevance as they'll have vast knowledge regarding AI programming.

Generative AI might be well on its way to rendering more jobs obsolete. While speaking at the World Government Summit in Dubai, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang indicated that we might potentially be looking at the death of coding as a career (via Tom's Hardware).

The CEO attributed these sentiments to the rapid advances and adoption of AI. Huang added that learning code shouldn't be considered a priority for anyone looking to get into tech moving forward.

Huang might be on to something. Over the past few months, multiple users have achieved incredible feats using ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, from developing software in under 7 minutes to generating free Windows keys.

Additionally, chatbots are getting exceptionally good at natural language processing, which means we might get to a point where we can generate code perfectly using these tools. Huang says that we might even get to a point where we can use our native language to code.

According to Huang:

"It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program. And that the programming language is human, everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle of artificial intelligence." 

NVIDIA's lead further indicated that users interested in coding should consider channeling this energy and dedicating it to other sectors, including farming, biology, manufacturing, and education. Coding isn't entirely dead in the water either; this is because some skills will still be required to determine when and where to use AI programming.

Huang added that upskilling might be the way around this imminent change in the tech landscape. Upskilling will future-proof professionals by equipping them with the knowledge on how to go about AI programming,

As this happens, GitHub recently unveiled GitHub Copilot Enterprise. It's an AI assistant designed to help users generate code suggestions, answer queries, and summarize changes based on the organization's internal code and knowledge base. The service is available to users via a monthly subscription of $39.

AI claims more jobs from professionals

The rapid growth and adoption of generative AI across the globe in the past few years has been quite fascinating. The emerging technology has presented new avenues to exploit and leverage opportunities across various landscapes, including computing, education, medicine, and more.

And while this is impressive, multiple users have expressed their reservations about AI. This can be predominantly attributed to the lack of elaborate safeguards and guardrails to prevent it from spiraling out of control. Not to mention the privacy and deepfakes issues. But what might be an immediate concern for people is the security of their jobs with the prevalence of technology.

As we speak, generative AI is already in the process of rendering some professions obsolete. This is especially true for architectural jobs. Even though AI-powered tools like Image Creator from Designer (Bing Image Creator) have been lobotomized, they are certainly good enough to render graphic designers and architects redundant.

Chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot are running on the latest LLM, GPT-4, coupled with DALL-E 3 image generation technology. This means they can handle complex and detailed queries better (though this doesn't necessarily mean they are perfect).