Openai says that CS degrees are still worth it

Good news, computer science major. One of the biggest names in AI is that your degree is still worth it.

Bret Taylor is chairman of Openai, the AI giant who recently launched his own AI coding agent, Codex. The tool is set to compete with human claud codes, cursors, replicas, and other atmospheric coding products targeting market share.

These tools are designed to ensure that engineers have fewer and fewer lines of code. The only goal is to encourage the agent and see its output.

With the rapid growth of AI coding, Taylor said he continues to support his computer science major. On his podcast, host Renee Rakitsky asked Taylor if students should still learn codes.

“Studying computer science is a different answer to learning code, but I think studying computer science is extremely valuable,” Taylor said.

Taylor listed some of the concepts that allow you to understand that computer science majors are more than just coding languages. Large O notation, complexity theory, randomized algorithms, cache misses.

“There's far more to coding than writing code,” he said. “Computer Science is an incredible major for learning systems thinking.”

Taylor received BS and MS in Computer Science at Stanford University.

Many of Taylor's AI competitors and colleagues agree. Microsoft CPO Aparna Chennapragada recently attacked a similar tone on the same podcast. Chennapragada said that AI pushes programming to “a much higher level of abstraction,” but does not eliminate the need for coding knowledge.

Sameer Samat, head of Android at Google, told Bi that computer science needs to be rebranded. Rather than “learning code,” Samat said computer science should surround “in my opinion, the science of solving problems.”

Meanwhile, the early impact of AI-assisted coding tools is clear.

On Google, CEO Sundar Pichai said that AI is writing 30% of the company's new code.

In the podcast, Taylor assumes that the engineer's future “operates the code generation machine” rather than inputting it into the device.

“My job as an operator of that code generation machine is to create a product or solve the problem,” Taylor said. “System thinking is always the most difficult part of creating a product.”