Reuters / Han Jingyu
- Anima Anandkumar says that the only competence that AI cannot replace is human curiosity.
- Professor Caltech tells students to use AI as a tool, not fear.
- She says that the major programmers who guide AI will be in high demand – but the bad coders will be in difficulty.
One of the main researchers of AI has a simple professional advice for young people worried about the skills to the test of future in the chatgpt era: be curious.
“I think that a job that will not be replaced by AI is the ability to be curious and attacking difficult problems,” said Anima Anandkumar, professor at the California Institute of Technology, said in an interview with EO Studio that was broadcast on Monday.
“So, for young people, my advice is not to be afraid of AI or to worry about skills to learn that AI can replace them, but really in this way of curiosity,” added Anandkumar.
Anandkumar, former principal director of research in NVIDIA AI and main scientist at Amazon Web Services, left the private sector in 2023 to return full -time to the academic world. She has been Professor Bren in the Caltech IT and Mathematics Department since 2017.
“I cannot imagine a world where scientists will be unemployed,” said Anandkumar, who previously helped build a meteorological model based on AI, Added. “A scientist attacks open problems – from subatomic material to galaxies – and there is an endless list.”
She also said that if laboratories like Deepmind from Google explore the “scientific AI” models, she thinks that real limitation is practical validation, not a lack of ideas.
However, it is skeptical about the media threshing around the entirely autonomous scientists of AI.
“The bottleneck goes to the laboratory or goes to the real world and tests them. It’s slow, it’s expensive,” she said.
Coding changes, but large programmers still gain
Anandkumar also shared career advice for software development, which is considerably disturbed by AI.
“A bad programmer who is not better than AI will be replaced,” she said. “But a big programmer who can assess what AI does, make fixes, (and) make sure that these programs are well written will be more requested than ever.”
His point echoes the CEO of Openai, Sam Altman, said in March: students should “become really good to use AI tools” because models are increasingly taking the generation of routine code.
The new graduates, however, feel the pressure. A survey of the handshake in 2025 in more than 3,000 college elderly people found that 62% of those who knew the IA tools said they were worried about how these tools could affect their careers, against 44% the previous year. Among computer students, 28% described themselves as “very pessimistic” as to their job prospects, citing the narrowed openings and fierce competition. Job offers dropped by 15%, while applications jumped 21%.
Meanwhile, some technology leaders openly sound the alarm. Victor Lazarte, partner of the investment company Benchmark, recently warned that AI already replaces workers and said that lawyers and recruiters should be particularly concerned.
Anandkumar, on the other hand, stresses that the key advantage always lies with humans who guide the systems.
“You have the agency as a human to decide which tasks do the AI, then you assess and you are in charge,” she said.
“Don’t be afraid of AI,” she added. “Use it as a tool to stimulate this curiosity, acquire new skills, new knowledge – and do much more interactive.”
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