Valve co-founder Gabe Newell broke down AI’s role in the future of work and creativity in a recent interview with YouTuber Zalkar Saliev. Newell said mastering both how AI tools work and how to use them is key to staying ahead.
He warned that developers who lean on AI-assisted programming might outpace traditional coders.
Gabe Newell stated: 
“I think it’s both.
I think the more you understand what underlies these current tools the more effective you are at taking advantage of them,
but I think we’ll be in this funny situation where people who don’t know how to program who use AI to scaffold their programming abilities will become more effective developers of value than people who’ve been programming, y’know, for a decade.
Even if you’re just a pure tool user you’re going to find that the gains to utilising those tools are very, very high.
But your ability to use those tools will continue to improve the more you understand the underlying methods and mindsets of people developing machine learning systems.
So I think it’s both, and I think they’re highly complementary.”
Newell called out filmmakers specifically, saying anyone ignoring AI will struggle soon.
He explained:
“If you’re a filmmaker and you don’t understand how to use AI, you’re really going to struggle in the not too distant future.
Because filmmakers who use AI will think to themselves ‘Oh, I could spin up a simple model to solve a very narrow problem that I have, and I understand its strengths and limitations and why I can’t get away with not using a foundation model to solve a technical problem.'”
He predicted AI’s impact on filmmaking will dwarf that of CGI by ten times.
Newell stressed real value comes from hands-on AI use, not just reading about it.
He added:
“If you’re a tool user, it will help you understand the capabilities when a lot of other people will be reading articles on Variety to try to understand what its impact is going to be on the industry.
Whereas some 19 year-old kid in his or her bedroom is like, ‘Oh, you guys really don’t understand this. I actually use this tool, and unless you’re a regular user of it, and have seen how it’s evolving and have a sense of how it’s going, you’re going to completely miss the opportunities of how to take advantage of it.’
And that same person in their bedroom, the more they try to write a little bit of code or try to dig into the research papers on the topic, the more that they’re going to find that it’s just trying to accelerate that process even further.”
Watch the full interview here:
