• Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google, said it will soon be possible for AI to match the skills of a junior engineer.
• He estimated it could happen within the next year during the "AI Ascent" event.
• AI will have to know more than basic programming to truly be at the level of a junior programmer, he added.

Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist, thinks that AI will soon be able to replicate the skills of a junior software engineer.

"Not that far," he said during Sequoia Capital's "AI Ascent" event, when asked how far AI was from being on par with an entry-level engineer. "I will claim that's probably possible in the next year-ish."

Plenty of tech leaders have made similar predictions as models have continued to improve at coding, and AI tools become increasingly popular among programmers. With sweeping layoffs across the tech industry, entry-level engineers are already fielding intense competition — only to see it compounded by artificial intelligence.

Still, Dean said, AI has more to learn beyond the basics of programming before it can produce work at the level of a human being.

"This hypothetical virtual engineer probably needs a better sense of many more things than just writing code in an IDE," he said. "It needs to know how to run tests, debug performance issues, and all those kinds of things."

As for how he expects it to acquire that knowledge, Dean said that the process won't be entirely unlike that of a person trying to gain the same skills.

"We know how human engineers do those things," he said. "They learn how to use various tools that we have, and can make use of them to accomplish that. And they get that wisdom from more experienced engineers, typically, or reading lots of documentation."

Research and experimentation is key, he added.

"I feel like a junior virtual engineer is going to be pretty good at reading documentation and sort of trying things out in virtual environments," Dean said. "That seems like a way to get better and better at some of these things."

Dean also said the impact "virtual" engineers will likely be significant.

"I don't know how far it will take us, but it seems like it'll take us pretty far," he said.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Business Insider prior to publication.

• Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn and partner at VC firm Greylock, says college assessments need to change in the AI era.
• Different kinds of tests could force students to learn more deeply, he said in a recent podcast interview.
• Oral exams would require students to develop greater knowledge, rather than relying on AI, he added.

AI can make it easier to game traditional college assessments like essays — so the way students are tested is likely to change, says LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman.

As a result, he added, students should expect college exams to become harder to fake their way through and to include an AI examiner.

"Wishing for the 1950s past is a bad mistake," Hoffman said on an episode of his podcast Possible, which he co-hosts. "The fact that universities have not changed, and it's like, 'Well, but I already have my curriculum, and this is the way I've been teaching it for the last, X decades,' et cetera."

Concerns regarding AI-driven academic dishonesty have been on teachers' minds since ChatGPT took off in late 2022. Plenty of students do use LLMs as homework help machines, rather than slogging through the work themselves. The current way that students are using AI to cut corners, Hoffman said, is circumventing the "whole point" of the educational system: learning.

"Obviously a student goes, 'Huh, I could spend 30 hours writing an essay, or I could spend 90 minutes with my ChatGPT, Claude, Pi — whatever — prompting and generate something for that,'" Hoffman said. "And obviously, to some degree, they're underserving what they actually really need."

The LinkedIn cofounder isn't an advocate for keeping AI out of schools — on the contrary, he believes there are ways in which it could aid learning, rather than kneecapping it. For instance, he thinks integrating AI into the curriculum could be more helpful than trying to stave off student usage.

"Whether it's an essay or an oral exam or anything else — you're going to go in and the AI examiner is going to be with you doing that," Hoffman said. "And actually, in fact, that will be harder to fake than the pre-AI times."

Prior to the advent of AI, Hoffman said, ways to "hack" the educational system already existed, such as piling on just enough knowledge to pass a written test or rushing to complete a passable essay that didn't dive much deeper than surface level. Potential AI examiners aside, Hoffman suggests that assessments like oral tests, which he believes are more difficult than written, could force students to study more intensely and absorb more overall.

"Part of the reason why oral exams are hard — generally reserved for Ph.D. students, sometimes master's students, et cetera — is because actually, in fact, to be prepared for oral exams, you got to be across the whole zoom," Hoffman said.

"Now, let's think if every class had an oral exam essentially on it," he added. "Ooh, you're going to have to learn a whole lot more in order to do this. And I think that's ultimately how this stuff will be."

There are also less drastic ways that teachers could be using AI to their advantage, Hoffman added, that don't require them to entirely rewrite their curriculums. For instance, if they believe that AI essays are subpar, they can provide students with examples of what not to do.

"Alright, so you're teaching a class on Jane Austen and her relevance to, call it, early literary criticism, or something like that," he said. "And you say, 'Okay, well I went to ChatGPT and I generated 10 essays, and here's the 10. These are D minuses. Do better.'"

The most important thing, Hoffman said, is that teachers bring AI into the classroom in some way, big or small, if only to gain a better understanding of how it can be applied in their fields. No matter their focus areas, it would be to their — and their students' — detriment to "ignore the new tool," he said.

"We're in a disruptive moment," Hoffman said. "We have a bunch of professors, just like classic, established professionals who go, 'I don't want to be disrupted. I want to keep my curriculum the way it is. I want to keep doing the thing that I'm doing.' And it's like, 'Well, no, you can't,' right? And so you need to be learning this."

Hoffman, who didn't immediately respond to a request for further comment on the topic, argues it's now an educator's responsibility to get their students ready to work with AI, given that he believes it will transform their future workplaces, as well.

"The most central thing is preparing students to be capable, healthy, happy participants in the new world," he said. "And obviously your ability to engage with, deploy, leverage, utilize, AI — AI agents, et cetera — is going to be absolutely essential."

Are you a teacher changing your approach to assignments or exams in the age of ChatGPT? Contact the author at [email protected]

• Jack Clark, cofounder of Anthropic, said he'd use an AI "teddy bear" or "bunny" to keep his child entertained.
• He expects "a lot" of parents would do the same if such a product becomes available.
• Rationing the tech, as with TV, is crucial, he said on an episode of Conversations with Tyler.

Jack Clark, the cofounder of Anthropic, "a lot" of parents will want an AI teddy bear to help entertain their kids — himself included.

"I think most parents, if they could acquire a well-meaning friend that could provide occasional entertainment to their child when their child is being very trying, they would probably do it," he said on an episode of the Conversations with Tyler podcast that posted last week.

AI tools for kids' entertainment are already here — including a Grimes-backed stuffed rocket ship, which kids can chat with and ask questions to, and a storytelling bear that uses artificial intelligence to generate narratives.

While Clark wasn't explicitly talking about those, he said he'd be supportive of toys with expanded capabilities — "smart AI friends" that could interact with children on the same level as someone in their age group.

"I am annoyed I can't buy the teddy bear yet," said Clark, who acted as policy director at OpenAI for 2 years before transitioning to Anthropic.

Clark said he doesn't think he's alone, either — as soon as children display a need to socialize, parents look for some way to get them to interact with their peers, he said. An AI companion could be an addition, rather than a substitute, he said.

"I think that once your lovable child starts to speak and display endless curiosity and a need to be satiated, you first think, 'How can I get them hanging out with other human children as quickly as possible?'" he said, adding that he's also placed his child on a preschool waitlist.

He's especially wished for the help of an AI tool while doing chores, he added.

"I've had this thought, 'Oh, I wish you could talk to your bunny occasionally so that the bunny would provide you some entertainment while I'm putting the dishes away, or making you dinner, or something,'" Clark said. "Often, you just need another person to be there to help you wrangle the child and keep them interested. I think lots of parents would do this."

Not all tech leaders agree — Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and father as of February, says he doesn't want his son's best friend to be a bot.

"These AI systems will get to know you over the course of your life so well — that presents a new challenge and level of importance for how we think about privacy in the world of AI," Altman said while testifying before the Senate last week.

A paper released by researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University said AI being used "improperly" by knowledge workers could lead to the "deterioration of cognitive faculties" — and students are frequently using AI to "help" them with their assignments. But some research does show children can be taught, early on, to work alongside AI, rather than to depend on it entirely.

Clark is an advocate for measured exposure — he said removing a hypothetical AI friend from a kid's life entirely could result in them developing an unhealthy relationship with the technology later on in life. If a child starts to show a preference for their AI companion over their human friends, it's up to their parents to reorient them.

"I think that's the part where you have them spend more time with their friends, but you keep the bunny in their life because the bunny is just going to get smarter and be more around them as they grow up," he said. "If you take it away, they'll probably do something really strange with smart AI friends in the future."

Like any other technology that's meant to provide entertainment, Clark said, it's ultimately up to parents to regulate their child's use.

"We do this today with TV, where if you're traveling with us, like on a plane with us, or if you're sick, you get to watch TV — the baby — and otherwise, you don't, because from various perspectives, it seems like it's not the most helpful thing," he said. "You'll probably need to find a way to gate this. It could be, 'When mom and dad are doing chores to help you, you get the thing. When they're not doing chores, the thing goes away.'"

Clark did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan says she uses Sundays to think deeply about the week ahead.
• She sets hard mental limits about taking a day of rest on Saturday, she said in a recent podcast interview.
• In order to perform at her "peak," Rangan says a break is necessary.

HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan has a method to avoid the "Sunday scaries" — starting her workweek early.

"I'm not scared of Sundays," Rangan said on a recent episode of the Grit podcast. "I enjoy it because it's my time. I get to decide what I'm learning, what I'm doing, what I'm thinking, what I'm writing. It is completely my schedule. I have nothing else to disturb me except my own thoughts."

Rangan said there hasn't been a weekend in the past fifteen years that she hasn't been working, though she hedges that it's not always particularly grueling.

"I can't claim that I work really hard," she said. "I have a schedule that works for me."

Rangan said she uses the day to prepare, more than anything else. Keeping up with the ever-shifting trends within the tech industry demands a decent amount of study, she added — she often uses Sundays for catching up, learning, and "play."

"Sunday morning, it's a full workday for me, and it's my workday," Rangan said. "This is the time I read, this is the time I do deep thinking, this is the time I write. It's a full day."

Rangan has set a hard line, though. Whenever she's finally done with work on Friday night, she's firmly clocking out for her version of the weekend.

"Then what I try to do is, Friday night whenever I'm done — it might be 8, 9, 10 — whatever time I'm done on Friday, I don't touch my computer and I don't think about work 'til Sunday morning," Rangan said.

Her boundaries came about, in part, thanks to the blurring of the home and the workplace during the pandemic. Because there was no real distinction between her office and what had previously been places of rest, Rangan said she had to set mental limits.

"One of the things I found, especially post-COVID or during the pandemic, is that there was no constraint," she said. "Your office was two minutes away from your kitchen, and so you're working all the time."

The CEO said that when she does pause on Saturdays, she doesn't send out so much as an email, even if a board member is trying to get a hold of her.

"My team knows that most of the time, almost always, I will schedule it for Monday morning," Rangan said. "They're probably waiting for the 5 a.m. Monday morning string of emails from me. But I work on Sundays, and I think on Sundays, and I do everything, and then I send it out. That's my day. I enjoy my Sundays."

Monday through Friday, it's lots of meetings and long days.

"During the work week, I start probably around 6, 6:30, and my first call is at 7," she said. "Then it's a full day—lots of calls like everybody else. Then I'll have dinner with the kids and then I'll work 'till 11. That's my schedule. Any day is maybe 12, 14, 15 hours."

To operate at full capacity, Rangan says that stopping, even if only for a day, is a nonnegotiable.

"I've constrained myself on that to say I need a break," she said. "It's almost like peak performance requires peak rest. You do need to take breaks."

• Nvidia's Llama Nemotron models were developed quickly, said Jonathan Cohen, VP of Applied Research.
• The speed was thanks to researchers across the company being willing to "give up their compute."
• "These days, the currency in any AI researcher is how many GPUs they get access to," he said in an interview.

In the world of AI research, the speed of development is limited in large part by available computing resources, according to Jonathan Cohen, Vice President of Applied Research at Nvidia.

"These days, the currency in any AI researcher is how many GPUs they get access to, and that's no less true at Nvidia than at any other company," Cohen said in an interview on Nvidia Developer.

Cohen led the team responsible for developing Nvidia's Llama Nemotron family of models. Released in March of this year, they represent the company's entry into the world of "reasoning" AI systems.

The speed at which the models came together was remarkable, Cohen said, taking "no more than one to two months." He partially credits the efficiency of their development to other workers being willing to sacrifice their processing power.

"So, there were a lot of researchers who very selflessly agreed to give up their compute so that we could get these Llama Nemotron models trained as quickly as we did," he said.

Cohen also attributed the speed of development to Nvidia's company-wide culture of prioritizing major projects, regardless of current team goals.

"How do you have a team to do a thing you've never done before? Part of the corporate culture is — we call them a 'swarm' — where you identify, 'This is something that's important,'" he said. "And everyone, every manager who has people who might be able to contribute, thinks about, 'Is this new thing more important than the current thing everyone on my team is doing?'"

If the manager can spare anybody, they'll "contribute" their direct reports to the new priority.

"Llama Nemotron ended up being a very cross-discipline, cross-team effort," Cohen added. "We had people from across the whole company working together without any formal organizational structure."

Llama Nemotron required a series of sacrifices, Cohen said, both in terms of computing power and personnel — but people were able to set aside self-interests for the benefit of the whole.

"It was really great to see, great leadership," he said. "There were a lot of sacrifices that people made, a lot of very egoless decisions that brought it together, which is just awesome."

Nvidia did not respond to a request for comment by Business Insider immediately prior to publication.

• Ryan Peterman, Meta engineer and writer of The Developing Dev newsletter, said visibility is key for promotions.
• If your work is impressive, it's in your best interest to let people know, he said in a talk at UCLA.
• Among the interns he's mentored, those who stood out were willing to be bold.

Doing good work isn't enough to get you promoted, says Ryan Peterman, an engineer at Meta. You also have to make sure everyone knows about it.

"If you go and build this amazing feature that nobody knows about, it doesn't matter how good it is, you're not going to get any recognition for it," Peterman said during a talk at UCLA. "And so, how do you advocate for yourself after you've done great work, which is the hard part?"

Peterman worked at Instagram for six years, climbing to staff software engineer before changing focus to AI training infrastructure at Meta. He's also the author of The Developing Dev newsletter, which offers career advice to engineers without their own mentors.

Making your accomplishments as public as possible is the key "last few percent" of climbing the career ladder, Peterman said. That can be as simple as writing a social media post or mentioning your success in a meeting, he added.

"I think a lot of people miss this, especially if they're more introverted or they're more quiet, just taking that last step on after the good work," Peterman said.

Overperforming in your current position isn't enough, Peterman said. He gives the example of a junior engineer who's "doing 10 times as many features" as the rest of their peers. Though they're likely to receive a positive performance review, they haven't proved that they're ready to take on senior responsibilities — only that they're extremely competent at tackling their current workload.

"When your manager is looking to fill out like the rubric for the next level, for instance, none of the things will be checked off," Peterman said. "There's nothing about initiative or doing anything that's expected of the mid-level."

Ideally, he added, you'll have a solid grasp of the "behaviors" exhibited by engineers at the level you're looking to reach — and will look to take on projects that allow you to showcase them. If you're lost as to what your organization might be looking for in more senior engineers, Peterman suggests talking to your supervisor.

"I was really, really eager to get promoted, and so I was constantly talking to my manager," he said. "As soon as I got promoted to one level, I was like, 'Okay, what's the next level? What can I do?' Maybe that was annoying for my manager, but he was really helpful in teaching me what were the things that I needed to pick up."

Above all else, he added, it's in your best interest to be as visible as possible. In the course of his time at Meta, Peterman has taken on five interns — those who stood out were just more willing to be bold.

"When I think about the ones that were rock stars, they had the audacity to propose improvements," he said. "Even though obviously I'm the more senior person, they had the audacity to ask questions, propose improvements. Sometimes they weren't right, but I could see the logic — but many times they were."

• Stefania Druga is a research scientist at Google DeepMind and creator of AI education platform Cognimates.
• Early AI literacy helps kids develop healthy relationships with the tech as they learn to "co-create," not cheat, she told BI.
• Druga said skills in AI and coding will still be relevant in the future, but how they're taught needs a refresh.

Google DeepMind research scientist Stefania Druga wants to encourage kids to use AI to "co-create" rather than to cheat.

And while there's been much debate about whether "learn to code" is still good career advice, she told Business Insider that she believes coding skills will continue to be valuable — but how they're taught in school needs a makeover.

Discussions about AI in education are frequently marked by the potential negatives, including cheating and skill atrophy. Young people, Druga said, are frequently heavy AI users — but they're not always leveraging it for the best ends.

"The way they're using it right now, in my opinion, is really disappointing," Druga said. "But it's not their fault. It's the way these technologies were designed. It's not the best thing that we could do with AI for learning, to make it solve our homework, or write our essays, or help us pass a test."

Druga said she believes part of the problem is the kind of assignments that students are expected to complete.

"We should be changing the whole framework. First of all, if an AI can solve a test, it's the wrong test," she said. "And then second, for like, generating essays — if you have a tool that always gives you pre-baked information, and there's no back and forth of any sorts, that's when you have issues of over-reliance and lack of critical thinking."

Druga said she first realized the need for AI education nearly a decade ago — long before the average person knew what an LLM was.

"Half of the households in the US would have a voice assistant, and people would ask things first to Alexa before asking their parents," Druga told BI.

Druga — also partially responsible for Scratch, a drag-and-drop programming language used to teach kids how to code — created Cognimates as part of her master's thesis at MIT. The program encourages AI literacy by way of engaging children in projects that pique their interest, including building games and programming robots, along with learning how to train AI models.

The idea is to provide kids with a platform to safely experiment with technology that will likely be a huge part of their lives for the foreseeable future.

"It's kind of creating this sandbox or playground for kids to engage in the scientific process, because they formulate hypotheses like, 'This is why Alexa responds in this way.' And then they have a way of testing that hypothesis very quickly," Druga said. "And the same would apply in the era of Gemini, ChatGPT, and large language models. How do we allow young people to create their own GPTs?"

Druga said she designed her own platform to be more socratic in nature — it poses questions to lead users along the right track, without feeding them the answer. And the kinds of problems that children are asked to solve, she added, mean that they're frequently proud, and consequently possessive, over their work.

"They're very attached to their project. It's a big part of their identity," Druga said. "So they're like, 'It's my project. I don't want AI to do it for me.' But when they get stuck, they would love to have someone to help them debug, or to help them find the right block, or to help them even navigate the platform."

According to Druga, the approach to preserving critical thinking while also making sure children begin developing AI literacy "as early as they can speak," should be two-pronged: When used in educational settings, AI models should support "co-creation" rather than helping students reach a finite answer as quickly as possible — and assignments themselves could be designed to be less cut-and-dried.

"The burden shouldn't be on them to always make the right choice, because I think that's too much to ask," Druga said. "If you were given boring homework and a tool that can do it for you, why wouldn't you use it? I don't blame them."

"We need to change how we teach and assess," she added. "But we also need to change how we design these tools in order to make room for young people's agency, young people's creativity."

Coding isn't dead — but coding education needs a refresh

Druga said Cognimates is teaching children skills that will serve them in a labor market that doesn't yet exist. And though she frequently hears that "coding is dead" (which she doesn't think is true) — she still views an education in the fundamentals, which now include an understanding of AI, as extremely useful.

"I think a problem with CS education and computing education for the longest time was that it would focus on market, and kind of preparing young people to get jobs in tech," Druga said. "It was this promise, like, 'Oh, if you have a CS degree, you're gonna have a cushy job and not have to worry about anything."

That's no longer true, Druga said, given the uncertainty in the job market due to sweeping layoffs and concerns about AI replacing human workers, but she believes that was the "wrong kind of goal" to begin with.

"What we're seeing with AI right now — in large language models and other architectures that are coming after large language models — is that the technology is changing so fast that if your entire value proposition for how you train people is to prepare them for specific stacks or jobs, that's going to become obsolete very fast," she said.

Ideally, Druga said preparation for working in tech involves transferrable skills, particularly teaching people to adapt to ambiguity, as the only constant she foresees is "change, and rapid change" — a view that Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis shares. While the traditional tech career path may not be viable by the time the children currently using Cognimates are ready to enter the workforce, Druga believes it also may not be necessary.

"I know personally, at least, like 20 people who are 19 and went from a prototype to having a fully financially sustainable product in couple of months," she said. "They don't even need VC money or a job in tech. They're just building. They identify a problem, they build a solution, they launch it, and they get paid for it. It's profitable. So talk about the future of jobs, right?"

Regardless of what children eventually end up doing with their skills in AI — Druga believes that what's important is that they develop them in the first place.

"The goal is to make sure that everyone feels like this is for me, and they don't feel intimidated, or they don't feel like, 'Oh, I need to have all of this background knowledge to even get started,' because things are changing so fast," she told BI. "I think the AI engineer or AI scientist frameworks are really challenging the way we thought about labor market education, and kind of the pipeline before."

• Google DeepMind's CEO says undergraduates should spend their time "learning to learn."
• Change will be the only constant in the next decade, Demis Hassabis told students at the University of Cambridge.
• By the time they graduate, students should have knowledge of their passions and core fundamentals, he added.

Cambridge students had a chance to submit questions to Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis earlier this year. They wanted to know how they should focus their time in the age of AI.

His advice? Spend your time "learning to learn."

"I think really understanding — using the time you have as an undergraduate to understand yourself better, and how you learn best," Hassabis said in an interview at Queens' College, Cambridge. Adaptability is key, he added, "how to pick up new material really quickly and getting adept at that."

The AI executive said he believes that today's college students will be entering a world where the only predictable factor is "an incredible amount of disruption and change," all due to developing technologies. He also offered his view on which industries he expected to grow.

"I would say especially AI, but also VR, AR, you know, quantum computing," he said. "All of these things are sort of looking like they're gonna be promising in the next five to 10 years."

Anytime there is change, he added, there is also "huge" opportunity.

"I think we're about to enter a period like that, perhaps like in the nineties when we were graduating, you know, it was the internet, and mobile, and gaming," Hassabis said. "I think we're in another one of those eras. So they're very exciting, but you've gotta be very nimble and embrace the new technologies that are coming down the line."

Hassabis said students should focus on the fundamentals. Though there's always likely to be a new fad, it's better to avoid becoming distracted by things that could be "in fashion today, but out of fashion tomorrow."

"I remember my favorite topics were things like computation theory and information theory, you know, studying things like Turing machines," Hassabis said. "That stayed with me for my whole career, really. So, I like the kind of mathematical underpinnings and a lot of the traditional, foundational work."

Students shouldn't neglect their passions, either, he added. By the time they're done with school, Hassabis said graduates should be able to "combine" deep knowledge of their interests with the core skills they've developed.

"In your spare time, you should be probably experimenting with whatever your passionate area is," Hassabis said. "In my case, it would be AI. With all the tools that are coming out — and a lot of it's very accessible and open source and so on — so that you really are up to speed with the absolute latest when you graduate."

As for graduate students, Hassabis suggested they develop expertise across a variety of fields. If they're learning about AI, for instance, they should also know where best to apply it.

"I feel like multidisciplinary research is really gonna come to the fore in the next sort of decade," he said.

There's likely to be a lot of "low-hanging fruit" where artificial intelligence and STEM fields intersect, he added, so it's important to know enough about both your subject areas to understand what the "right questions" are — as asking them could lead to breakthroughs.

"Picking the question is about having this sort of taste or smell, if you like, of intuition, of, 'What is the right problem?' Is it the right time to tackle that problem, as well?" Hassabis said. "Because timing can be really difficult. You don't want to really be 50 years ahead of your time."

And though Hassabis said you can't really train that sixth sense, he says you can keep an open mind, and remain ready to jump at the opportunities when they do appear.

"They can come up from anywhere," he said. "So that kind of goes with being multidisciplinary, exposing yourself to a wide range of ideas."

• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang credited AI with a resurgence of San Francisco's tech scene.
• Since ChatGPT's launch in 2022, AI companies have become some of the city's biggest tenants.
• They've also attracted talent looking to capitalize on what Huang called another "industrial revolution."

Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, says the AI boom reversed the San Francisco tech exodus.

"It's because of AI that San Francisco is back," Huang said during an episode of the Hill & Valley Forum podcast.

"Okay, anybody who lives in San Francisco, you'll know what I'm talking about. Just about everybody evacuated San Francisco," he added. "Now it's thriving again. It's all because of AI."

While San Francisco was far from becoming a ghost town of any sort, as many as 89,000 households left San Francisco during the height of the pandemic in 2020, taking advantage of the rise in remote work to ship out of state entirely or settle in nearby suburbs. And families weren't alone in fleeing — some major tech firms, including HP, Palantir, and Oracle, moved their headquarters out of the city, while other industry leaders left in favor of cities like Austin and Miami.

But since the release of ChatGPT in the latter half of 2022, the growth of AI companies has breathed some life back into the city's flagging tech sector, becoming some of its biggest tenants.

In recent years, AI companies have rented out more than 1.7 million square feet of office space, The San Francisco Standard reported, citing research from real estate company JLL. According to Forbes, real estate agents have even taken to calling Mission — a district in the city where OpenAI is headquartered — "Area AI," for its dense population of related firms.

In 2024, one of every three VC dollars invested went into an AI startup, according to the data firm Pitchbook. Globally, 35.7% of VC funds went to AI and machine learning startups last year, and in North America alone, AI firms raked in nearly 50% of venture capital funding.

AI companies have attracted a host of people to the Bay Area looking to capitalize on what Huang describes as another "industrial revolution." Despite concerns that AI-assisted coding, sometimes called "vibe coding," could negatively impact the number of job openings for software engineers, many tech firms continue to hire quickly amid the AI arms race.

"In our company, just as a starting point, every single software engineer is now assisted by AI assistants," the Nvidia CEO said. "And the amount of code that we check into the company is incredible as a result. Our productivity has shot up through the roof, and we're hiring more people."

AI has enabled Nvidia to "create more things the world desires," Huang added, and the company's revenue, along with its "ability to hire," have increased alongside its use of the technology.

San Francisco's population numbers are responding positively to the AI boom, according to Forbes — the city is now seeing growth again after around 7% of its citizens left between 2020 and 2022. Residential real estate prices are up, too, with 57% of homes in San Francisco selling above their asking price during February of this year, according to Redfin data. That's up 50% from 2024, and represents the biggest jump among the top 50 metros in the US, surpassing even New York.

And while interest from the AI sector may not presently be enough to completely repopulate the vast number of offices standing vacant in downtown, the sustained interest of another tech boom could make a bigger dent. If the industry keeps growing at its breakneck pace of 30% a year, the San Francisco Examiner estimated it could take up around 12 million square feet of commercial real estate by the end of the decade — or a seventh of the office buildings in San Francisco.

• Former "Mythbusters" host Adam Savage says college shouldn't be an automatic choice.
• He said on his YouTube channel that higher education is especially worth it if you're sure of what you're pursuing.
• A gap year can help people figure out what they really want to do with their careers, he added.

Adam Savage, the former "Mythbusters" host, says college is absolutely worth it — if you know what you're interested in learning.

But there's nothing wrong with a gap year to give you more clarity on what you want to do with your career, he said on his YouTube channel, Adam Savage's Tested.

Savage — a special-effects pro who starred in the hit Discovery Channel show "Mythbusters" alongside Jamie Hyneman for over a decade — said pursuing higher education depends entirely on the individual.

"We encounter school so early that it is just this monolith, right?" Savage said. "We encounter school as literal babies, and then toddlers, and then children, and then young adults. And then we go through the slog of junior high and high school, and we're supposed to go to college."

But we need to go to college, right?

Well, Savage suggests students should intentionally decide to attend college, not feel like it's an unbreakable rule. It's up to each student, he said.

"One of my sons took a gap year, and went and worked production in Los Angeles between graduating from high school and going to college," he said. "And that was a spectacular move for him. He got to live as an adult with a job that had to pay rent, he had a roommate — he got the full life experience at 18."

Savage said his son came back from LA with a "thousand-yard stare," having been "raked over the coals" during his work on a series of independent films. The life experience, though, was "great," Savage added.

"When you've had a little life under your belt, I think school means a fundamentally different thing than it does when you're just continuing the pipeline of going from child, to young adult, to adult, to school," he said.

Savage's wife, he added, also took a break before finishing college. She dropped out and entered the workforce, eventually returning to school with a renewed sense of clarity.

"She started watching her peers go on and graduate and move on, and she was working as a waitress, and she was like, 'Yeah, I want to get back into this. I think I'm losing time,'" he said. "And when she went back to school, she knew what she was going for."

Going to college straight away can still be a great decision, he said. People who know exactly what they're interested in dive into higher education with a unique tenacity, Savage added.

"Everybody I've ever met who went back to school knowing what they were going for — none of them ever got anything but an A in anything that they were doing," he said. "Because when you're interested in your subject, you're going to you're going to do really well at that."

Ultimately, regardless of the individual choices someone makes, Savage believes there might be a bit too much dependence on "certain kinds of experience," and not enough recognition of the "mental frames" that people can bring to their jobs.

"I have long said that there are people I have met, who don't make stuff for a living, who I would hire in a heartbeat to build stuff in this cave, on the clock for me," Savage said from his workshop. "Because I just know their skill. I can see it in them."

• Rahul Pandey, a former staff engineer at Meta, said much of his career was thanks to luck.
• He said on an episode of "The Developing Dev" that building a strong network can help luck along.
• Networking by being genuinely curious about others can help you get more opportunities, he said.

Rahul Pandey, former staff engineer at Meta, credits much of his career trajectory to good fortune. But you can still make your own luck — at least in part.

"You can manufacture luck in the sense of being curious about the people and the opportunities around you," Pandey said on an episode of "The Developing Dev" podcast.

Pandey's path through tech started right out of college, when he joined a startup run by one of his former professors at Stanford. From there, he bounced from Pinterest to Meta, where he eventually climbed to staff engineer before leaving to start Taro, a YC-backed startup that offers career coaching to software engineers.

To line up those kinds of opportunities takes a degree of luck, Pandey acknowledged. But they're more likely to come if you develop a network — and do it by being genuine, he said. By reaching out on the basis of real curiosity and making sure you have something to share, you can avoid making a cold reach-out feel clinical.

"Me doing a lot of the job hops in my career have come from just, again, being kind of in the know on — what are the people doing that I respect?" he said. "And so I think that can be a repeatable algorithm or repeatable process that's not dependent on luck. Just change your approach to networking or talking to people, and that's a really good way to manufacture luck."

If your conversations feel stilted, Pandey suggests evaluating whether there's an equal balance of give-and-take.

"I do think that one of the best ways to develop a relationship with someone is not just by asking a ton of questions or asking for mentorship," he said. "A really good way to develop a relationship is say, 'Hey, here's something I've worked on which might be interesting to you.'"

Pandey said the strategy of "being thoughtful about what are you sharing" makes the speaker more likely to build productive relationships.

"You create gravity," he said. "People gravitate toward you because they want to get your opinion on things, too. So it's like a two-way street."

When first deciding to start his career at a fledgling company, Pandey said he felt it was a high-risk, high-reward option.

On the one hand, "it could go really, really well," he said; but even in the worst case, it'd be a "good story to tell."

"I felt like it was almost too good of a story to pass up. I could be one of 10,000 or 20,000 engineers in Big Tech if I go join Google or Microsoft or Meta — and I had received offers at all of them," Pandey said. "But then I felt like, okay, this is a story where I had this connection, relationship with the professor. He trusts me, I trust him, and it just feels like a Silicon Valley unique story."

Pandey said he used a decision-making framework of thinking of his career paths being either a one-way or a two-way door. That helped him decide between gambling on a startup or going the more traditional (and usually more secure) route of signing on with a big-name company.

"Most things in your career are two-way doors, in the sense that you try it out, you learn something, you experiment, and then you can always back out," he said. "You can always decide to leave the startup and then go to Big Tech if needed, so that was one consideration.'"

Another consideration: Pandey had already taken on an internship with Meta the summer before his graduation and felt like he'd already earned a level of "approval" from Big Tech. Also important, he added, was the "often overlooked" storytelling potential of the riskier route.

"The narrative that you can create about what you did, why you did it, and why it's interesting — that is incredibly powerful," Pandey said. He got a lot of mileage out of being able to describe his experience as an "enterprising young engineer" who "took a bet on a startup," he added.

When you're on the precipice of a big career decision, Pandey suggested it could be useful to consider what might eventually be the better story. Those opportunities, he added, are typically the ones that allow you to meet more people and take on unique responsibilities.

"One of the things I tell people, on Taro or just in general when I mentor people, is that if you have a choice between A and B, and you feel like A is the one which will give you exposure to more unique opportunity, unique people, unique stories — that's a really good argument to pick option A," Pandey said, "because it just will broaden your perspective and give you that storytelling ability."

• Phoebe Gates, youngest daughter of Bill and Melinda Gates, co-founded her own business.
• Bill Gates said she 'luckily' didn't ask for funding to get Phia, an e-commerce tool, off the ground.
• The Gateses had previously told her that dropping out to start a company wasn't an option.

Phoebe Gates, the youngest of Bill and Melinda Gates's children, has made her own entry into the business world.

Her billionaire father is glad he didn't have to fund it.

"I thought, 'Oh boy, she's going to come and ask,'" Gates told The New York Times in an interview published Thursday.

Gates would've backed his daughter's business, but his help would've come with strings — and that would have made things complicated, he said.

"I would have kept her on a short leash and be doing business reviews, which I would have found tricky, and I probably would have been overly nice, but wondered if it was the right thing to do. Luckily, it never happened," he said.

Phia, which launched April 24, offers price comparisons for clothing across 40,000 linked sites, aiming to bring users the best deals.

On an episode earlier this year of "The Burnouts," the podcast Phoebe Gates hosts with her former roommate and current cofounder Sofia Kianni, Gates said her father was apprehensive about her starting a business.

And Phoebe dropping out of college — like Bill did when he founded Microsoft — was totally out of the question.

"I literally never hear my dad talk about the start of Microsoft," Gates said. "I literally mostly just remember him talking about the foundation. I remember me wanting to start the company and him being like, 'Are you sure you want to do this?'"

Gates graduated from Stanford in 2024 with a degree in human biology, having completed her education in just three years.

"They were very much like, 'You need to finish your degree; you don't just get to like, drop out and do a company.' Which is so funny because my dad literally did that, and that's, like, the reason I'm able to go to Stanford or have my tuition paid," Gates said.

Gates felt like a "nepo baby" in her freshman year, she said at the time. And though her father has previously said he plans on allowing his kids to inherit only 1% of his total wealth — that still amounts to millions each.

"If the business is successful, people will say, 'It's because of her family,'" Gates told The New York Times. "And a huge portion of that is true. I never would have been able to go to Stanford, or have such an amazing upbringing, or feel the drive to do something, if it wasn't for my parents. But I also feel a huge amount of internalized pressure."

So far, Gates and Kianni have secured over half a million dollars in funding — some from a VC firm, some from angel investors, according to The Times.

Gates said her business venture is tapping a huge market.

"We're roommates fighting about clothing," Gates told the New York Times. "We are the girls who are scouring shopping sites for deals. And there are, frankly, thousands of other young women like us."

• The job market for software engineers isn't impossible to break into, says a Microsoft Xbox worker.
• The idea that AI can replace engineers is "overhyped," Will Kencel told "Codesmith."
• Adjusting your job search strategy in the face of failure can be hugely helpful, he added.

Getting a job in tech is hard right now — but not out of the question, said Will Kencel, a senior engineer for Microsoft Xbox.

"When people are saying it's impossible to get a job — it's not impossible," Kencel said in an interview with "Codesmith." "You can do different avenues for how you can get to your career."

Though the opportunities are fewer and the competition fiercer, Kencel, who first got a role at Microsoft in 2021, believes the strategy required to land a tech job in today's market is relatively similar to when he was seeking one in the past.

"My goal was to get a job, just like everybody," he said. "It was easier back then. It's harder now, but it's similar tools and determination."

Concerns have escalated about a collapsing career ladder for younger workers as well as job losses to automation. Yet Kencel doesn't believe that AI will soon be taking the place of software engineers. That trend is "overhyped," he added, and job seekers should avoid allowing it to torpedo their morale.

"I would say, 'remain optimistic,'" Kencel said. "Because if you're optimistic about an outcome, it's far more likely that the outcome will actually happen, than if you offer a pessimistic attitude — 'I can't do it, these interviews are too hard.' Every time I failed, I didn't even see it like that. This thing didn't work — you retool."

The job search is proving grueling for out-of-work engineers, with relevant openings in the US on Indeed down by more than a third, compared to five years ago. With the gap between positions lengthening for many, Kencel acknowledged that being out of a job can be "hard on the brain" and can start to grate at a person's sense of worth. Unemployment, he added, is never a reflection of your value.

"Don't let where you're at determine your self-worth as a software engineer, and don't let it get you down," he said.

There's not a sure-fire way to guarantee success in the course of the search, Kencel said. Instead, it's a "lot of little things that add up." By approaching the hunt from different angles, seekers better their overall chances of success, he said.

"It's not going to be like a great project you made, or you have a great website for yourself, or one connection you made," Kencel said. "It's a lot of those little things."

Kencel suggested treating failure as an opportunity to switch approaches. If something isn't working out, it could be time to try a new tack rather than continuing to apply the same way.

"Don't give up. 'Cause it's hard and it can be discouraging at times, but if you experience some sort of failure, just rework your strategy," he said.

As for more actionable advice on how to stand out in a crowded market, Kencel suggests getting out from behind the computer screen and attending relevant local events as often as possible. Broadening the search to include in-person jobs could also prove beneficial, he said.

"I feel like going to actual in-person events and lining up roles like that in your pipeline is important," he said. "Remote gets so many applicants. In your city, you can really stand out more to people actually there."

Despite any temptation to quit out of frustration, sticking with the search is paramount, Kencel told Business Insider.

"Don't get discouraged and just stop trying," he said. "That's like taking something that you've worked and built up and saying, 'All right, this is as far as it's going to get,' when you can always take something further and build it up bigger."

There's always a next step to be taken to improve your chances, he added, be it building a "website, adding blog posts," or "going to conferences."

"That mountain of work you have to do just starts with one step," Kencel said. "And that's a clichéd saying, but it is true. As long as you take that step and build up more each time, you get there."

• Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan said AI doesn't necessarily make engineers "10x as productive."
• Even if AI is writing "90%" of code, engineers have other responsibilities, he said on "Lenny's Podcast."
• The cofounder said some companies may benefit from onboarding more engineers as AI makes them more efficient.

Just because AI is becoming increasingly capable of writing the lion's share of code, that doesn't necessarily mean engineers will be "10x as productive," said Varun Mohan, the CEO and co-founder of Windsurf.

"Engineers spend more time than just writing code. They review code, test code, debug code, design code, deploy code, right?" he said on an episode of "Lenny's Podcast."

Windsurf, which offers coders an AI-powered development tool, has been riding the recent wave of vibe coding hype. Founded in 2021 as Codeium, the company is reportedly in talks to be acquired by OpenAI for around $3 billion. It previously raised $243 million in VC funding, according to PitchBook.

Concerns regarding the injection of AI into a flagging tech jobs market are rampant — but Mohan believes many companies should be investing more heavily into their teams of engineers, rather than paring back on hiring.

"We are definitely seeing over 30, maybe close to 40% productivity improvements," Mohan said. "But I think for the vision that we're solving for, even if I were to say the company in the long tail had 200 engineers, it'd probably be too low still, at that point. So the question is, how much more productivity do you get per person?"

He uses the hypothetical example of the CIO of JPMorgan Chase to illustrate the thinking of a big-name company with a budget — he expects these kinds of firms to realize that it's time to onboard more employees, rather than thin the ranks.

"Her budget on software every year is $17 billion, and there's over 50,000 engineers inside the company, and you told her, 'Hey, each of these engineers are now able to produce more technology,'" Mohan said. "That's effectively what you've done, right? The right calculus that JPMorgan Chase, or any of these companies will make is — the ROI of building technology has actually gone up."

Mohan believes that, in the short term, companies might benefit from bringing on "even more engineers."

"So the opportunity cost of not investing more into technology has gone up, which means that you should just invest even more," he said in the podcast interview. Windsurf did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment by Business Insider.

While Mohan does qualify that it's not a blanket solution — some of those who bet on a boosted team of engineers will likely benefit greatly.

"Now, that's not true across the board. There are some companies that are happy with the amount of technology they're building, and there's a ceiling on the amount of technology they want to build," he said. "But for companies that actually have a very high technology ceiling, this doesn't mean you stop. This actually means you hire more."

• An engineer's success is often largely determined by their manager, Dave Anderson said.
• The former Amazon engineering director said relationships with teammates and supervisors are crucial.
• On the "Pragmatic Engineer" podcast, he said underestimating a supervisor's influence is a mistake.

A large part of an engineer's success is often tied to how they navigate their relationship with their manager, a former Amazon engineering director, Dave Anderson, said.

"I would actually say, as a manager, even, like 50% of that performance, frequently, is your relationship with your manager and your team. How will you fit in with the team, with your peers, with your manager?" he said on a recent episode of "The Pragmatic Engineer," a podcast.

Underestimating your supervisor's influence can be particularly dangerous at a company like Amazon, he added. As can be the case at other companies, a manager's decisions can shape the future of their direct report, from determining how much they're compensated to how far up the career ladder they climb.

The influence a manager can have over an engineer's trajectory isn't something to shrug off, Anderson said.

"I think the mistake that people will sometimes make is like, 'My manager doesn't influence my job that much because I can work independently,' or, you know, 'I don't need to figure this out with my manager because I can, you know, work with my peers, or I have this great engineer on my team I can work with,'" Anderson said.

But if your manager doesn't like you, he added, you're "never ever" going to be able to snag a promotion.

It's also important to remember that managers are often asked to point out a number of team members "who are not doing great," Anderson said. If you are, when compared with other members of your team, the "least effective," he added, you could be on the chopping block.

"If you look around the room and you're thinking, 'Yep, I'm the worst one here' — that's not a great situation to ever be in. It's just never safe," Anderson said. "And at Amazon, it's definitely not safe. Some other companies where they just might do layoffs once every four years, you might be safe for quite a while. But Amazon has this sort of regular cycle."

In response to a request for comment from Business Insider, Margaret Callahan, an Amazon spokesperson, said Anderson's experiences were his alone.

"These claims reflect the opinion of one individual who worked at Amazon years ago. They're not based in fact, and aren't indicative of what it was like to work here then or what it's like today," Callahan said. "We're proud to be one of the most sought-after employers in the world and to have ranked in the top three in LinkedIn's Top Companies for eight years running."

Anderson said that if an engineer's relationship with their manager isn't good, there can be an escape hatch of sorts: moving teams before being managed out.

"So many times I've had someone who was either doing amazing on one team, they moved to the next team, and they're, like, actually not doing well at all, or someone who was not doing well escapes to another team before they get fired — and they do well," he said.

If you start to hear rumblings from further up the chain of command, Anderson thinks it could be in your best interest to make a change, and swiftly.

"This is, like, my sneaky recommendation for anyone is like — if you start to hear performance feedback whatsoever from your management chain, if you have any opportunity at all, get off your team fast as possible," he said.

In a follow-up email, Anderson told BI that in a "great number of situations," he'd seen success prove itself to be at least partially dependent on team fit.

"I've seen poor performers turn into great performers, and great performers turn into poor performers — and the only factor was them switching teams," he said. "In particular, switching teams to a place where they didn't know their manager. I don't think people fundamentally changed — so the only reasonable conclusion is that team fit (in particular, their relationship with their manager) is the deciding factor."

Anderson doesn't suggest disavowing any negative feedback you receive and bailing out into a different section of the company on a whim. It depends, he said, on the relationship you've formed with your supervisor and whether you have faith in their advice.

"Now, if you trust your manager, they might be actually just giving you honest feedback, which you'd like to be able to receive," he said. "But for the most part, if you've been working for someone for three years and suddenly they start giving you performance feedback, that's a really bad sign."

Anderson added: "If you run for the hills fast enough, it's possible you'll get away before they flag you in the system as non-transferable."

• Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of Netflix, said AI can open the door to improving movies overall.
• In addition to making them cheaper, as James Cameron recently said, Sarandos said he believes movies can be made "better."
• Talent at Netflix is already leveraging AI, particularly in VFX, he said on a Q1 earnings call.

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said he believes AI's true potential in Hollywood lies not in making movies more cost-efficient, but overall "better."

"There's a ton of excitement about what AI can do for content creators," Sarandos said on a Q1 earnings call when asked about how "meaningful" AI could be. "I read the article too, what Jim Cameron said about making movies 50% cheaper. I remain convinced that there's an even bigger opportunity if you can make movies 10% better."

Earlier this month, "Avatar" director Cameron said AI had the potential to cut the cost of blockbuster movies clear in half — a necessity, he said, if the medium is to survive. He's an advocate of using it to reduce expenses for "big effects-heavy, CG-heavy" films, rather than to generate "word salad" scripts.

Already, Sarandos said, creators at Netflix are using AI in just that fashion.

"So, our talent today is using AI tools to do set references or pre-vis, VFX sequence prep, shop planning, all kinds of things today that kind of make the process better," Sarandos said.

Sarandos said he believes it also allows smaller films to have access to effects that previously would've been locked behind large budgets typically reserved for big-name projects.

"Traditionally, only big-budget projects would have access to things like advanced visual effects, such as de-aging," he said. "So, today you can use these AI-powered tools to enable smaller budget projects to have access to big VFX on screen."

The technology remains controversial in Hollywood.

Concerns about the potential damage AI could do to creative industries, particularly in terms of job replacement, partly sparked the 2023 joint strike of SAG-AFTRA and the WGA. Since the resumption of production across the industry, AI as a technology has continued to advance rapidly, but has remained relatively narrow in terms of scope — largely confined to the VFX department.

Sarandos cited the experience of cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto as an example of how AI can be leveraged successfully, in this case, to reduce the cost of a de-aging effect.

"A recent example I think is really exciting, Rodrigo Prieto was the DP on 'The Irishman' just five years ago," Sarandos said. "And if you remember that movie, we were using very cutting-edge, very expensive de-aging technology that still had massive limitations, still created a bunch of complexity on set for the actors."

Just half a decade later, Sarandos said, AI has substantially shrunk the cost of de-aging.

"Using AI-powered tools, he was able to deliver this de-aging VFX to the screen for a fraction of what it costs on 'The Irishman,'" he said. "In fact, the entire budget of the film was about the VFX costs on 'The Irishman.'"

Moving forward, Sarandos said Netflix aims to continue to create opportunities for AI to improve what it's like to work as a creator, rather than replace the role entirely.

"So, same creator using new tools — new better tools — to do something that would have been impossible to do just five years ago," he said. "That's incredibly exciting. So, our focus is simple: find ways for AI to improve the member and the creator experience."

• Phil Spencer, Microsoft Gaming's CEO, said not all IP needs to be adapted into new mediums.
• Adaptations should make sense as creative outlets, rather than something that "has to get done," he told Variety.
• Part of assessing what IP should be adapted is accepting the possibility of failure, he added.

Video games seem like veritable gold mines, given Hollywood's penchant for betting on established IP. Screen adaptations are working with familiar stories and can often count on built-in audiences.

But the CEO of Microsoft Gaming said not every game needs a second life on-screen.

"The video game business is successful by itself. It doesn't need this outlet," Phil Spencer said in an interview with Variety when asked if he thought there was Microsoft gaming IP that shouldn't be adapted.

"You've got to start with a partner who understands our team and the story of that IP and then letting them work through the process," Spencer said. "That's my only barrier: let's never turn this into something where it has to get done, every franchise has to have a game or a movie or a TV show, and it becomes more like licensing. It's got to be about the creative outlet that linear media offers for our franchises."

Adaptations have become increasingly common in the last half decade — the "Sonic" franchise crossed the $1 billion mark, doing well for Sony, the critically acclaimed "The Last of Us" began its second season on HBO Max just a few days ago, and "Until Dawn," tenuously inspired by its horror-game predecessor, is dropping later this month.

Microsoft itself recently scored a big win with the box-office dominating "A Minecraft Movie" — which borrowed its aesthetic, if not necessarily the details of its plot, from the hugely popular sandbox game of the same name.

Microsoft paid $2.5 billion to acquire Mojang Studios, the company behind Minecraft, in 2014. The film adaptation has rocketed up to become the second-highest-grossing game-to-movie adaptation of all time, sitting just beneath "The Super Mario Bros. Movie."

Porting video games to film or TV has met varied success, including among projects that drew from Microsoft-owned IP — "Fallout," which found a home on Amazon, reviewed well and boasted 65 million viewers within the first two weeks of its release, while "Halo," widely disliked by many fans of the first person shooter, petered out after airing on Paramount+ for two seasons.

So, going forward — how exactly does the tech giant plan to calculate what IP is worth the risk? First, Spencer said, comes accepting that the "hit rate" for success isn't going to be "100%."

"So then when you look at this and you say, OK, these kind of opportunities of a place that we're not native as creators, we build video games, I really start from, does the team have a unique point of view around what they want to get done?" he told Variety. "Have they found a partner that really understands the franchise and the core of what these worlds are? And then support them."

Spencer, for his part, said he's glad the gaming industry is being recognized as a medium with strong characters and storylines that can be compelling enough for movie studios to believe they'll resonate with entirely new audiences. The relationship between platforms has changed drastically, he added.

"I think movies went through books, when you think about things like 'Lord of the Rings,' and then they kind of moved into comics with the whole Marvel and 'Batman,' all of this," Spencer told the trade publication. "And you really see that industry turning its view to video games, because they have a large community, and the stories are actually rich and deep enough. And I love that."

And though the change is exciting, and Microsoft certainly plans to continue exploring opportunities in adaption, Spencer said he wants the company's gaming arm to continue prioritizing the medium it was named for.

"Now, we can build worlds that can support these things showing up in traditional media, I think that's awesome," he said. "But I'm really trying to keep us focused on being a great creator of interactive entertainment, video games, and then if these other opportunities show up, great. But we start most IP, almost all of our new IP, with, how is it going to play?"

• Spotify wasn't working for many users on Wednesday morning.
• Outage reports spiked, with users encountering issues on iOS, Android, and the web player.
• Spotify said normal service had returned as of 11:45 am ET following an "outage."

If your go-to Spotify podcast wasn't loading on your morning commute today, you weren't alone.

On Wednesday morning, the music streaming service said it was aware of "some issues" and was investigating.

"We're aware of some issues right now and are checking them out!" the company posted on X.

There was a large spike in outage reports on the third-party website DownDetector around 8:45 a.m. ET.

The outage issues seemed to span across multiple platforms — Business Insider tried to access Spotify's web player, but the site returned only an error message. When attempting to load up the iOS app, BI encountered a pop-up that reads, "Something went wrong," followed by "Have another go?" with an option to refresh the page. We also ran into issues accessing Spotify on the Android app.

In a statement to BI, a Spotify spokesperson said that the service experienced "an outage today beginning around 6:20am EDT" but that normal service had resumed.

"As of 11:45am EDT, Spotify is back up and functioning normally," the spokesperson said. "You can check @SpotifyStatus X channel for any additional updates."

• Sam Altman acknowledged that OpenAI's naming conventions could be less confusing.
• The OpenAI CEO said the way it names AI models would see an overhaul "by this summer."
• He's previously said ChatGPT was a "horrible" name and had become too ubiquitous to change.

GPT-4o. o1 mini. GPT-4.1.

Confused about the names of the various AI models powering ChatGPT? You're not alone.

Even CEO Sam Altman says the AI giant deserves to be mocked over the branding choices. You can also expect an overhaul to the AI model names — perhaps as soon as this summer.

"How about we fix our model naming by this summer and everyone gets a few more months to make fun of us (which we very much deserve) until then?" Altman wrote on X this week.

Altman's post comes on the heels of OpenAI's latest family of AI models, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and GPT-4.1 nano, which the company says demonstrate "major gains" in coding. For now, the new models are only available through OpenAI's API, or the software interface that allows third-party apps and services to plug into OpenAI's models.

OpenAI's model names have been the subjects of much confusion, with a series of numbered, nonspecific names like GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini, o1-pro, o3-mini, and so on, making it relatively difficult for users that are unfamiliar with the minutiae of the tech to distinguish between models without actively trying them out or reading up on their differences.

Altman isn't the only member of OpenAI to acknowledge that model names might benefit from some reworking — his chief product officer, Kevin Weil, expressed his own distaste for the company's naming practices on a recent episode of Lenny's Podcast.

"It's absolutely atrocious and we know it, and we will get around to fixing it at some point, but it's not the most important thing, and so we don't spend a lot of time on it," Weil said.

"We name things like o3 mini high," he added, laughing.

Don't expect the name ChatGPT to go anywhere, however — Altman previously told Trevor Noah that while he thought "ChatGPT" was a terrible name, it may be too "ubiquitous" to change.

"No marketer ever would've picked ChatGPT as the name for this, but we may be stuck with it," Altman said. "And that might be alright."

• GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke believes coding should be taught as a core subject in schools.
• In a recent podcast interview, he said AI "democratizes" access to software development.
• Current developers should every tool available to keep sharpening their skills, the CEO added.

You should still learn to code, says GitHub's CEO. And you should start as soon as possible.

"I strongly believe that every kid, every child, should learn coding," Thomas Dohmke said in a recent podcast interview with EO. "We should actually teach them coding in school, in the same way that we teach them physics and geography and literacy and math and what-not."

Coding, he added, is one such fundamental skill — and the only reason it's not part of the curriculum is because it took "us too long to actually realize that."

Dohmke, who's been a programmer since the 90s, said he's never seen "anything more exciting" than the current moment in engineering — the advent of AI, he believes, has made the field that much easier to break into, and is poised to make software more ubiquitous than ever.

"It's so much easier to get into software development. You can just write a prompt into Copilot or ChatGPT or similar tools, and it will likely write you a basic webpage, or a small application, a game in Python," Dohmke said. "And so, AI makes software development so much more accessible for anyone who wants to learn coding."

AI, Dohmke said, helps to "realize the dream" of bringing an idea to life, meaning that fewer projects will end up dead in the water, and smaller teams of developers will be enabled to tackle larger-scale projects. Dohmke said he believes it makes the overall process of creation more efficient.

"You see some of the early signs of that, where very small startups — sometimes five developers and some of them actually only one developer — believe they can become million, if not billion dollar businesses by leveraging all the AI agents that are available to them," he added.

Dohmke isn't the only tech leader to have identified the potential for leaner workforces — Garry Tan, CEO and president of famed Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator, previously said he believes AI-assisted coding, or "vibe coding," now allows 10 or so engineers to build what would've once required the efforts of "50 or 100." Shrinking tech teams, however, could mean even fewer openings in software development, leading to anxiety around job replacement.

"The anxiety is understandable, but time and again, developers have discovered how to channel the new capabilities into entire domains of innovation that didn't exist before," Dohmke wrote in a January blog post. "They have always used automation to make their life easier."

Though the tools are new, the mindset that GitHub's CEO said will best allow programmers to take advantage of them is anything but. For those already in the industry, Dohmke advises retaining a sense of curiosity and using everything on hand to continually sharpen their skills.

"You got to keep rehearsing. You got to keep training. You got to keep learning. You're never done with learning," he said. "If I look back 30 years of what development looked like back then and what it looks like now, I would have been very behind if I hadn't constantly read blogposts, literature, and tried out things myself."