Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis said at a London business conference, in a video published on Wednesday, that technical grounding gives people with a STEM degree an advantage, allowing them to use artificial intelligence tools ten times more effectively than those without it. Hassabis framed the shift in programming languages as evolutionary, noting that people first wrote in machine code, then C, then Python, and the next step may be English, but the underlying logic of software does not disappear. He said people still need to know about architecting things and best software engineering practices, and that those who understand the deep technical will be able to use these tools 10 times more effectively. Hassabis also called for a revival in the humanities, saying the time is now for fields like philosophy and economics. He co-founded DeepMind in 2010 alongside Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman; Google bought the London-based company in 2014 for more than $500 million, according to TechCrunch. In 2024, Hassabis shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John Jumper and David Baker for work on AlphaFold. Geoffrey Hinton told Business Insider in December that while routine mid-level programming was unlikely to remain a viable career, the computer science degree itself retained its value.