Technical grounding gives people a STEM degree AI advantage that lets them use artificial intelligence tools ten times more effectively than those without it, Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis said at a London business conference, in a video published on Wednesday.
The claim cuts against a growing anxiety in universities and tech circles that degrees in computer science and engineering are losing their value as AI-assisted coding, sometimes called vibe coding, lowers the barrier to writing software.
Hassabis framed the shift in programming languages as evolutionary rather than disruptive. People first wrote in machine code, then C, then Python, he said, and the next step may be English. But the underlying logic of software does not disappear. ‘You absolutely needed to lean into STEM and computer science,’ he said. ‘It’s just a higher-level programming language is the way you can think about what programming is going to become.’
Why the STEM Degree AI Advantage Holds
The argument rests on architecture and engineering practice, not syntax. ‘You’re still going to need to know about architecting things and best software engineering practices,’ Hassabis said. ‘Those people who understand the deep technical, they’ll be able to use these tools 10 times more effectively than people who don’t have that technical knowledge.’
Hassabis also called for a parallel revival in the humanities. ‘I also believe that the time is now for the humanities like philosophy, economics. I think we really need them in the world we’re about to enter,’ he said.
Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010 alongside Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, according to The Guardian. Google bought the London-based company in 2014; TechCrunch reported the price as more than $500 million, though other outlets cited figures ranging from $400 million to $650 million at the time. In 2024, Hassabis shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John Jumper and David Baker for work on AlphaFold, the protein-structure system with far-reaching implications for disease research and drug discovery. He was also knighted in 2024 for services to artificial intelligence, and has appeared on Time magazine’s 100 most influential people list in both 2017 and 2025.
A Chorus of Voices Pushing Back on the Redundancy Argument
Hassabis is not alone in this position. Geoffrey Hinton, widely referred to as the ‘godfather of AI,’ told Business Insider in December that while routine mid-level programming was unlikely to remain a viable career, the computer science degree itself retained its value well beyond coding. ‘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. ‘CS degree will be valuable for quite a long time.’
Max Levchin, CEO of Affirm and a co-founder of PayPal, made a similar case on a podcast earlier this year. Levchin, who served as PayPal’s chief technology officer until its acquisition by eBay in 2002, argued that a solid computer science foundation is what allows a programmer to distinguish good code from bad. ‘There’s a matter of taste and elegance in programming,’ he said, according to a transcript of the Tim Ferriss Show. ‘That’s certainly important to me as a programmer, and without having a solid foundation in computer science, I wouldn’t be able to have that conversation.’
The convergence of views from figures as different as a Nobel laureate AI researcher, the godfather of deep learning, and a fintech founder suggests the tech industry is settling on a working answer to the redundancy question: AI raises the ceiling for technically literate people more than it lowers the floor for everyone else.
For students weighing their options, the more pointed question may not be whether to study STEM but how to pair it. Hassabis’s appeal to philosophy and economics alongside computer science points toward a future where the STEM degree AI advantage belongs to those who can reason about the systems they build, not just instruct them.