'Godfather of AI' Yann LeCun on what 20-year-olds should do to thrive in the AI era

French-American scientist Yann LeCun, regarded as one of the godfathers of artificial intelligence (AI), has an advice to 20-year-olds: Learn things that have a long shelf life.

This includes fundamental subjects such as mathematics, physics, basic computer science, and applied mathematics.

"Those are the things that would be necessary to understand and develop the next generation of AI systems," LeCun said in an interview to Moneycontrol.

His comments come as generative AI is dramatically changing the way developers code with the emergence of AI coding assistants such as Google's Gemini Code Assist, Microsoft's GitHub Copilot, Amazon's Q Developer (previously CodeWhisperer) and AI software agents such as Devin (Cognition Labs).

"The question (for a 20-year-old) is what specialty should I learn? Is it worthless to learn computer science because AI systems are going to programme better than they can? No, that's not true," LeCun said.

"If you had a choice between taking a course on mobile app development, the shelf life of which will be about three years, and learning quantum mechanics, learn quantum mechanics. That's my recommendation," he said.

Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun's advice to 20-year-old people

LeCun, who is VP and Chief AI scientist at Facebook parent Meta, said that AI will help people learn these subjects and work with them, but they still need to learn the basics.

For people in their 30s or 40s, LeCun advised against putting all their chips on what they think will be the next big thing, as it is likely to change within three to five years.

"Technology is going to change completely. The capabilities are going to be much bigger than they currently are. So don't make choices that make you a prisoner of a hypothesis about where technology is going," he said.

LeCun currently runs Meta's Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab that is working on the next generation AI systems, beyond large language models (LLMs). "Systems that understand the world, have persistent memory, can plan and reason. Current LLMs can’t do this. This is a big challenge for the next five years to a decade," he said.

India must take greater participation in the research community, not just in engineering and product development, as this would encourage students to explore AI careers within the country, LeCun said.

"We created a research lab in Paris, France, about 10 years ago, and it had an enormous effect on the local ecosystem...It motivated students to, instead of going into finance, to do a PhD in AI. Some of those people we hired at FAIR, but most of them went into the ecosystem and did startups," he added.

India can follow a similar model, LeCun said. "Probably, centered on Southern India - Bengaluru or Chennai (IIT Madras), and perhaps others," he said.

Read the full interview: AI pioneer Yann LeCun: India must embrace open source, invest in research to become an AI hub like France