Computer science alone is not enough to prepare students for the world that awaits them, a top OpenAI official said.
“The main place where I would be worried, if I was a student right now, is if I was studying CS and my college didn’t allow the use of any AI, because then I would just feel like I’m falling behind,” OpenAI’s Codex product lead Alexander Embiricos said during an episode of the A16z podcast posted on Tuesday.
Embiricos said it is still a great time to study computer science. His advice to students is just to make sure they are preparing for the future.
“I think it’s still a great time to major in CS,” Embiricos said. “I think there’s going to be so much more software created and therefore so much more software engineers needed. But I also think, figure out how to be using AI constantly while you do it.”
While OpenAI isn’t hiring many introductory-level employees, Embiricos said he cares about whether applicants have built something.
“I don’t know if this is advice, but what I can say is that when I look at new grad profiles, for me, the thing that I take the most signal from is if they’ve built something and if they’ve built something that’s linked from their profile,” he said.
Colleges and universities are trying to rethink how to teach computer science as hiring slows and agentic AI tools like OpenAI’s GPT-5-Codex become more adept at generating software. Thomas Cortina, a professor and an associate dean for undergraduate programs at Carnegie Mellon University, told The New York Times earlier this summer that AI has “really shaken computer science education.”
Cortina said students themselves were “resetting” after relying on AI to complete assignments, but then realizing they didn’t understand large parts of the underlying code.
Embiricos is not alone in his view. OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor has said a computer science degree is still valuable for learning “systems thinking.” OpenAI researcher Szymon Sidor encouraged high school students to continue to learn to code.
Asked how he would reconfigure a computer science department, Embiricos said he would emphasize helping students become “very mentally plastic in terms of how they get things done.”
“I would have a handful of classes where folks do things very manually to understand what’s going on behind the scenes, and also to build the confidence that they can,” he said. “But then generally, I would move towards having students trying to deliver some kind of outcome, be it like they’ve learned something or they’ve built something or something like that.”
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