Computer Science

“When in computer science, often you'll hear people say like, hey, like maybe I'm a system design architect, right? And I, my job is to think about like what the big distributed system is going to look like in Google search. Well, you don't spend every minute o…”

“Now, if you're not into computer science, if you don't feel like you're drawn to it, like a fly drawn, drawn to a light, then don't go into it because someone told you you're going to make a boatload of money working for Google. That's gone. So that it's prett…”

“Well, I will say if computer science is, like, the field of computer science where you're, like, learning about you know, data structures and algorithms, that's not going to change. So if you, and there's always going to be need for people to understand the un…”

“I always laugh when, you know, people say, you don't need to be an engineer. Don't do computer science. I actually think like that is like still one of the most protected job categories because things are only getting more technical. Things are only going to g…”

“It was one billion dollars a year for computer science and that they're trying to cut that into half of that, but we need 10 to a hundred billion dollars to do frontier AI research.”

“Having these skills to understand the sort of fundamentals of what's possible with algorithms and data structures, I think that actually really helps you in, in managing agents when you're using them. And I, I'm guessing that it will continue to be a valuable …”

“We have significant science envy. We even attempt to call it computer science. There are some people who do computer science in the machine learning world, so that it's a real thing, but clearly that's not, It's a vocational art.”

“I think that programming like math is kind of just a good general education. I don't think that that goes away, and I think that there's also lots of practical skills that comes from studying computer science right now.”

“People often ask us, like, my son or daughter is in high school or has just started college. Should they even be studying computer science? And my answer is always absolutely yes.”

“And I think computer science especially at least sort of the foundations of it will continue to be the foundations of how we build software and understanding that when you're interacting, particularly with something that's smarter than you producing code, you …”

“People ask me all the time, you know, it's my son or daughter is, 16, you know, should they even be studying computer science? And I always say, yeah, absolutely. And I think the reason is because these are, you know, the concept level things that actually all…”

“A lot of folks think about, oh, you know, don't bother studying computer science, or, you know, the coding is dead, and I just fundamentally disagree. If anything, I think You know, we've always had higher and higher layers of abstraction in programming. You k…”

“And first of all, the question of, you know, whether you should still learn the code, my answer would be absolutely yes. I think to a large extent, you know, computer science, when you take computer science classes and when you learn these fundamentals, sure, …”

“Even if you want to study law, medicine, chemistry, or whatever, you should combine it with computer science, because all of these fields are going to change over the next couple of decades.”

“The last 50 years, if you look at computer science course enrollments, they're up by 90%. None of us are surprised by it. But electrical engineering course enrollments are down by the same amount.”

“I am skeptical that, like, the really valuable thing is just people who can code in five years. I think it's much more likely, like, the people that have these contrarian ideas around what's missing in markets and have the taste of What like features and nuanc…”

“My take is that programming is actually more important today And it's just going to happen at a different level of abstraction. One could argue that the leap from assembly to Python was actually maybe even a bigger leap than the leap from Python to natural lan…”

“What's interesting to me is like these two Nobels, these guys, but also Jeffrey Hinton's, you know, you're really seeing now the convergence of the hard sciences and computer science. In a really meaningful way.”

“And just to show you how entrepreneurs sometimes have incredibly little vision I remember thinking, well, I guess he's cornered that market. You know, no more opportunity for people to build websites. And that was actually, like, weirdly, like, a deterrent for…”

“74% of high school girls wanted to pick a career that was about changing the world. And back then, less than like .2% of girls were going into computer science.”

“And back then, less than, like.2% of girls were going into computer science.”

“In college, if I declare poli-sci as a major when I start my freshman year, there's a 99% chance that I am going to complete college majoring in political science. But if I declare computer science as a major, I'm a woman, a person of color, there's only a 75%…”

“A lot of research, at least in computer science, the kind of stuff that I've worked on, a lot of research is basically, is mostly prototyping. It's like, can we showcase an idea, but it's not really software engineering of like, we'll build a thing that can be…”

“If you come up with an idea, you have to get it passed through legislation and it's a very long process. Computer science is much more exciting in that way because you can just build something. You don't really need permission to do it.”

“Understanding the code is still important. Think if you use generative AI to write an essay, You still need to read that essay. You don't just say, please write me a blog post and then, okay, it's done. Ship it. You want to read it and confirm it's the thing t…”

“I think it's gotten worse over the past few decades, like below, 18% of college graduates are women in computer science.”

“We've seen studies at Carnegie Mellon that actually would create introductory computer science classes before the college class starts. And for the women who did join those classes, they actually graduated at Similar rates as their bail counterparts.”

“So there's this strong evolutionary Force, this gradient forcing compatibility on the web. This is something a lot of people in computer science, especially programming languages, just hate because it means you really can't make incompatible changes except v…”

“Computer science and stats is to this century, because physics was awesome for, you know, understanding the natural world... Now, today, because so much of the world is a constructed virtual world... CS and stats becomes, I mean, it was valuable before, but it…”

“When you get out of work and you get promoted and you start doing things, those skills quickly fall away. I can't solve people problems with computer science as much as I would have loved to some days, right? Like computers, you give it the same instructions. …”

“Biology is kind of where computer science was like late sixties, early seventies, which is we're about to see like this whole new set of technologies that will dramatically change the costs and the automation and the price curves for a lot of these things.”

“When you teach computer science in a project-based way, you also got to do some design. You got to do some user acquisition. You got to do some customer discovery. You got to work on a team and actually you get more communication skills than you might in a Lib…”

“It is unique, and it is this meta-discipline, I mean, I think, and it's become the new meta-discipline that everybody needs to learn. Because algorithmic thinking is such a fundamental thing about how the world operates these days.”

“And this is a big gap right now because the senior people in the field, it's highly unlikely that most of Most of them are going to take a year or two out and go back and learn a bunch of things about computer science and statistics and machine learning ideas.…”

“I thought 10 years ago that computer science was going to become second to the biological sciences in terms of getting the best students, and that Everybody, the really best students were going to go do the biologicals, biotech, things like this. Well, that's …”

“You know, I think that data science will become the new academic approach in computer science. There'll be less coding and more about data science. New algorithms for data science, new Approaches to understand the world around us. So, you know, we can call thi…”

“What we're really seeing emerging are new founders, Founders that also live in both of these worlds. Founders that have deep experience in the biology and deep experience in computer science, and actually, for these types of companies, I think that's going to …”

“20, 25 year horizon that I'm talking about. So, so I think beyond that, yes, I think it's wide open, but I think, you know, for the next 25 years, I think this is what I'm talking about. I think computer science will continue to run everything. Software will c…”

“We now have the opportunity to make progress in many of those fields, and in fact, the best way to make progress in many of those fields is to apply more computer science.”

“He proposes what he calls the third culture which are the people who can bring the two cultures together and the people who can bring, you know, physics, or now computer science, into liberal arts, and the people in liberal arts who can learn and understand, e…”

“The computer science major at Stanford is, is exploding in the sense that we are now the largest major on campus and it's continuing to grow.”

“It's kind of interesting that we're even the largest either largest or second largest major for women on campus. So if you literally count number of women, computer science is now either the largest or the second largest on campus.”

“There's an old computer science saying that a computer should never ask you a question it should be able to work out the answer to.”

“From the point of view of monetary economists, we're exploiting cutting edge, ah, computer science, ah, to set the clock back 300 years.”

“Large parts of physics and CS have been coming together in the last decades you know, partly statistical physics made this very, very deep connection between like spin glasses and condensed matter physics and combinatorial optimization problems.”

“I think mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, material science, computer science, all these disciplines are pushing into biology, and so instead of steel, it's bone, or it's muscle, but the same principles actually carry over really nicely, and if yo…”

“So we believe APIs are going to be the new way of consuming computer science, right? It used to be an application on, say your desktop, and then perhaps it was a webpage or a mobile app. Next, we think it's going to be an API.”

“As we move beyond software, we're at this point where we're seeing this incredible convergence between biology, computer science, and engineering. And it's this convergence that's going to give us broad new superpowers to understand and manipulate biology. Ess…”

“With computational biology, there are a lot, there are very interesting opportunities around diagnostics, where you can build a company in a way that's more similar to the way you build a computer science company. That's a lot of what we're funding, and so I t…”

“Having those two skill sets makes you, like, There's, you will have no problem getting started in the industry just because there are very few people who have both vocabularies and the kind of opportunities in it are so big, so I, like, I don't think you can m…”

“And I would say all of the investments I've made have founders of this character that I could have a deep discussion with them in the computer science as well as the biology.”

“More and more, the interesting things that are happening is computer science gets applied to more fields. More and more, we're hitting the real world which is to say we're hitting real world regulations we're hitting real world laws, we're hitting real world p…”