Dec 7, 2025

Why Should Students Still Learn to Code in the Age of AI? Prof. Hany Farid Farid Has an Answer

From Business Insider

Godfather of AI’ says CS degrees “will remain valuable for quite a long ’ — and students should still learn to code

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The ‘godfather of AI’ says now isn’t the time to give up on computer science degrees — even if AI is changing the coding industry.

“Many people think a CS degree is just programming or something,” AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton told Business Insider. “Obviously, just being a competent mid-level programmer is not going to be a career for much longer, because AI can do that.”

Hinton said the value of a CS degree is much more than just coding, which is why he thinks a “CS degree will be valuable for quite a long time...”

And UC Berkeley professor Hany Farid told us that the best jobs for CS graduates right now are not at “the usual suspects in Silicon Valley.”

“I have always contended that the most exciting applications of computer science are not at Facebook, Google, and Amazon, but at the intersection of computing and other fields like: computational drug discovery, medial imaging, computational neuroscience, computational finance, digital humanities including art and music, computational social science, policy, etc,” Farid.

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Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley.

Last updated: December 15, 2025