A Caltech Professor Says AI Can’t Replace This One Skill

One of AI’s leading researchers has a simple piece of career advice for young people worried about future-proof skills in the ChatGPT era: be curious.

“I think one job that will not be replaced by AI is the ability to be curious and go after hard problems,” Anima Anandkumar, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, said in an interview with EO Studio that aired on Monday.

“So for young people, my advice is not to be afraid of AI or worry what skills to learn that AI may replace them with, but really be in that path of curiosity,” Anandkumar added.

Anandkumar, a former senior director of Nvidia’s AI research and principal scientist at Amazon Web Services, left the private sector in 2023 to return full time to academia. She has served as the Bren Professor in the computer science and mathematics department at Caltech since 2017.

“I can’t imagine a world where scientists will be out of jobs,” Anandkumar, who previously helped build an AI-based weather model, added. “A scientist tackles open problems — from subatomic matter to galaxies — and there’s an endless list of those.”

She also said that while labs like Google’s DeepMind are exploring “AI scientist” models, she believes the real limitation is practical validation, not a lack of ideas.

Still, she’s skeptical of the hype around fully autonomous AI scientists.

“The bottleneck is going to the lab or going to the real world and testing them. That is slow, that is expensive,” she said.

Coding is changing, but great programmers still win

Anandkumar also shared career advice for those in software development, which is being significantly disrupted by AI.

“A bad programmer who is not better than AI will be replaced,” she said. “But a great programmer who can assess what AI is doing, make fixes, [and] ensure those programs are written well will be in more demand than ever.”

Her point echoes what OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in March: students should “get really good at using AI tools” as models increasingly take over routine code generation.

New graduates are feeling the pressure, though. A 2025 Handshake survey of over 3,000 college seniors found that 62% of those familiar with AI tools said they were worried about how those tools might affect their careers, up from 44% the year before. Among computer science students, 28% described themselves as “very pessimistic” about their job prospects, citing shrinking openings and fiercer competition. Job postings fell 15%, while applications jumped 21%.

Meanwhile, some tech leaders are openly sounding the alarm. Victor Lazarte, a partner at investment firm Benchmark, recently warned that AI is already replacing workers, and said lawyers and recruiters should be especially concerned.

Anandkumar, by contrast, stresses that the key advantage still lies with humans who guide the systems.

“You have the agency as a human to decide what tasks AI does, and then you’re evaluating and you’re in charge,” she said.

“Don’t be afraid of AI,” she added. “Use it as a tool to drive that curiosity, learn new skills, new knowledge — and do it in a much more interactive way.”