{"id":204837,"date":"2025-12-26T11:30:06","date_gmt":"2025-12-26T11:30:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/204837\/"},"modified":"2025-12-26T11:30:06","modified_gmt":"2025-12-26T11:30:06","slug":"i-listened-to-50-tech-leaders-talk-about-ai-heres-what-i-learned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/204837\/","title":{"rendered":"I Listened to 50 Tech Leaders Talk About AI. Here&#8217;s What I Learned."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve listened to and interviewed more than 50 tech leaders this year, from executives running trillion-dollar firms to young founders betting their futures on AI.<\/p>\n<p>Across boardrooms, conferences, and podcast interviews, the people building our AI future kept returning to the same four themes:<\/p>\n<p>1. Use AI, because someone who understands AI better might replace you<\/p>\n<p>This is the line I heard most often. Nvidia CEO <a target=\"_self\" class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/nvidia-ceo-employees-use-ai-every-task-possible-2025-11\" data-track-click=\"{&quot;element_name&quot;:&quot;body_link&quot;,&quot;event&quot;:&quot;tout_click&quot;,&quot;index&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;,&quot;product_field&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;}\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Jensen Huang<\/a> has said it multiple times this year.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Every job will be affected, and immediately. It is unquestionable. You&#8217;re not going to lose your job to an AI, but you&#8217;re going to lose your job to someone who uses AI,&#8221; he said at the Milken Institute&#8217;s Global Conference in May.<\/p>\n<p>Other tech leaders echoed his view, with some saying that younger workers may actually have an edge because they are already comfortable using AI tools.<\/p>\n<p><a target=\"_self\" href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/sam-altman-ai-workforce-future-jobs-2025-8\" data-track-click=\"{&quot;element_name&quot;:&quot;body_link&quot;,&quot;event&quot;:&quot;tout_click&quot;,&quot;index&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;,&quot;product_field&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;}\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">OpenAI CEO Sam Altman<\/a> said on Cleo Abram&#8217;s &#8220;Huge Conversations&#8221; YouTube show in August that while AI will inevitably wipe out some roles, college graduates are better equipped to adjust.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;If I were 22 right now and graduating college, I would feel like the luckiest kid in all of history,&#8221; Altman said, adding that his bigger concern is how older workers will cope as AI reshapes work.<\/p>\n<p><a target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/godmother-of-ai-value-of-college-degrees-silicon-valley-2025-12\" data-track-click=\"{&quot;element_name&quot;:&quot;body_link&quot;,&quot;event&quot;:&quot;tout_click&quot;,&quot;index&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;,&quot;product_field&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;}\">Fei-Fei Li<\/a>, the Stanford professor known as the &#8220;godmother of AI,&#8221; said in an interview on &#8220;The Tim Ferriss Show&#8221; published earlier this month that resistance to AI is a dealbreaker. She said she won&#8217;t hire engineers who refuse to use AI tools at her startup, World Labs.<\/p>\n<p>This shift is already showing up in everyday roles. An accountant and an HR professional told me they&#8217;re <a target=\"_self\" class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/non-technical-people-vibecoding-lessons-ai-apps-2025-9\" data-track-click=\"{&quot;element_name&quot;:&quot;body_link&quot;,&quot;event&quot;:&quot;tout_click&quot;,&quot;index&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;,&quot;product_field&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;}\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">using AI tools<\/a>, including vibe coding, to level up their skills and stay relevant.<\/p>\n<p>2. Soft skills matter more in the AI era<\/p>\n<p>Another consensus I&#8217;ve heard among tech leaders is that AI makes soft skills more valuable.<\/p>\n<p>Salesforce&#8217;s chief futures officer, <a target=\"_self\" class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/salesforce-skill-important-coding-empathy-engineer-peter-schwartz-2025-5\" data-track-click=\"{&quot;element_name&quot;:&quot;body_link&quot;,&quot;event&quot;:&quot;tout_click&quot;,&quot;index&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;,&quot;product_field&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;}\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Peter Schwartz<\/a>, told me in an interview in May that &#8220;the most important skill is empathy, working with other people,&#8221; not coding knowledge.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Parents ask me what should my kids study, shall they be coders? I said, &#8216;Learn how to work with others,'&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n<p>              <img xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" class=\"lazy-image \" encoding=\"UTF-8\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" data-content-type=\"image\/jpeg\" srcs=\"{&quot;https:\/\/i.insider.com\/694e1ddd04eda4732f2e2169&quot;:{&quot;contentType&quot;:&quot;image\/jpeg&quot;,&quot;aspectRatioW&quot;:4032,&quot;aspectRatioH&quot;:3024}}\" alt=\"salesforce peter schwartz\"\/><\/p>\n<p>                      I interviewed Salesforce&#8217;s chief futures officer, Peter Schwartz, in May.<\/p>\n<p>              Lee Chong Ming\/Business Insider<\/p>\n<p>LinkedIn&#8217;s head economist for Asia Pacific, Chua Pei Ying, also told me in July that she sees <a target=\"_self\" href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/big-tech-career-progression-soft-skills-2025-6\" data-track-click=\"{&quot;element_name&quot;:&quot;body_link&quot;,&quot;event&quot;:&quot;tout_click&quot;,&quot;index&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;,&quot;product_field&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;}\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">soft skills<\/a> like communication and collaboration becoming increasingly important for experienced workers and fresh graduates.<\/p>\n<p>As AI automates parts of our job and makes teams leaner, the human part of the job is starting to matter more.<\/p>\n<p>3. AI is evolving fast \u2014 and superintelligence is coming<\/p>\n<p>As the year went on, the stakes around AI&#8217;s future began to feel bigger and more real. Tech leaders increasingly spoke about chasing artificial general intelligence, or AGI, and eventually superintelligence.<\/p>\n<p>AGI refers to AI systems that can match human intelligence across a range of tasks, while superintelligence describes systems that surpass human capabilities.<\/p>\n<p>Altman said in September that society needs to be prepared for superintelligence, which could arrive by 2030. Mark Zuckerberg established Meta&#8217;s Superintelligence Labs in June and said that the company is pushing toward superintelligence.<\/p>\n<p>These leaders don&#8217;t want to miss the AI moment. Zuckerberg underscored that urgency in September, saying he would rather risk &#8220;misspending a couple of hundred billion dollars&#8221; than be <a target=\"_self\" class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/mark-zuckerberg-meta-risk-billions-miss-superintelligence-ai-bubble-2025-9\" data-track-click=\"{&quot;element_name&quot;:&quot;body_link&quot;,&quot;event&quot;:&quot;tout_click&quot;,&quot;index&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;,&quot;product_field&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;}\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">late to superintelligence<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Some tech leaders, such as Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, argued that the industry has already achieved AGI. Others are more cautious. Google DeepMind&#8217;s cofounder, Demis Hassabis, said in April that AGI could arrive &#8220;in the next five to 10 years.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Even when tech leaders disagree on timelines, they tend to agree on one thing: AI progress is compounding.<\/p>\n<p>I saw this acceleration from the outside as a user. New tools are rolling out at a dizzying pace \u2014 from ChatGPT adding <a target=\"_self\" class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/chatgpt-openai-shopping-feature-efficient-google-2025-4\" data-track-click=\"{&quot;element_name&quot;:&quot;body_link&quot;,&quot;event&quot;:&quot;tout_click&quot;,&quot;index&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;,&quot;product_field&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;}\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">shopping features<\/a> and image generation to China&#8217;s &#8220;<a target=\"_self\" class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/lingguang-china-vibe-coding-ant-group-agi-camera-chatgpt-sora-2025-11\" data-track-click=\"{&quot;element_name&quot;:&quot;body_link&quot;,&quot;event&quot;:&quot;tout_click&quot;,&quot;index&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;,&quot;product_field&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;}\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">AGI cameras.<\/a>&#8220;<\/p>\n<p>Things that would have felt magical in January now feel normal.<\/p>\n<p>              <img xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" class=\"lazy-image \" encoding=\"UTF-8\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" data-content-type=\"image\/jpeg\" srcs=\"{&quot;https:\/\/i.insider.com\/694e1e7b832e0ef1ead6d32d&quot;:{&quot;contentType&quot;:&quot;image\/jpeg&quot;,&quot;aspectRatioW&quot;:1600,&quot;aspectRatioH&quot;:900}}\" alt=\"LingGuang\"\/><\/p>\n<p>                      I tried Ant Group&#8217;s vibe coding app LingGuang&#8217;s AGI camera last month.<\/p>\n<p>              Lee Chong Ming\/LingGuang<\/p>\n<p>            4. The human needs to be at the center of AI<\/p>\n<p>Many leaders also circled back to the need for human control amid AI acceleration.<\/p>\n<p>Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman said superintelligence must support human agency, not override it. He said on an episode of the &#8220;Silicon Valley Girl Podcast&#8221; published in November that his team is &#8220;trying to build a humanist superintelligence,&#8221; warning that systems smarter than humans will be difficult to contain or align with human interests.<\/p>\n<p>Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been blunt about the risks AI poses if it&#8217;s misused.<\/p>\n<p>While advanced AI can lower the barrier to knowledge work, the risks scale alongside the rewards, Amodei said on an episode of the New York Times&#8217; &#8220;Hard Fork&#8221; published in February.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;If you look at our responsible scaling policy, it&#8217;s nothing but AI, autonomy, and CBRN \u2014 chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear,&#8221; Amodei said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It is about hardcore misuse in AI autonomy that could be threats to the lives of millions of people,&#8221; he added.<\/p>\n<p>Geoffrey Hinton, often referred to as the &#8220;godfather of AI,&#8221; said in August that as AI systems surpass human intelligence, safeguarding humanity becomes the central challenge.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We have to make it so that when they&#8217;re more powerful than us and smarter than us, they still care about us,&#8221; Hinton said at the Ai4 conference in Las Vegas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I&#8217;ve listened to and interviewed more than 50 tech leaders this year, from executives running trillion-dollar firms to&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":204838,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-204837","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204837\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/204838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}