Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla says Gen Z's best hedge in an AI-first economy isn't a college degree or a trade but learning how to learn, fast.
What Happened: In a wide-ranging conversation on Nikhil Kamath's “People by WTF" podcast, the Sun Microsystems cofounder urged young workers to design careers around agility.
"You have to optimise your career for flexibility, not a single profession," he said, adding that those who master AI will outpace those who don't. "The people who don't know how to use AI will be obsoleted by people who know how to use AI first."
Khosla framed the skill shift bluntly, "ChatGPT can teach you any new areas," a view he says renders fixed academic paths less relevant as tools accelerate self-directed learning. He also sketched an aggressive timeline for automation. "Almost certainly, with no doubt, there isn't a job where AI won't be able to do 80% of all jobs" within three to five years, says Khosla.
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Pressed by Kamath on where a 22-year-old should focus, Khosla argued for first-principles thinking across disciplines and continuous reinvention rather than anchoring to a credential. "At age 70, I'm learning at a much faster pace than I've ever learned in my whole life," he said, casting adaptability itself as the credential that compounds over time.
Why It Matters: Khosla's stance increasingly mirrors Silicon Valley's mainstream. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has told students he'd lean into AI tools and hard sciences over traditional coding tracks, advice that fits in with Khosla's call for flexible, math-and-physics-rooted foundations.
Salesforce's Marc Benioff has argued AI won't erase white-collar work outright but will reward those who reskill, even as Anthropic's Dario Amodei warns big slices of entry-level office jobs could go to algorithms. The debate puts a premium on the kind of rapid adaptation Khosla prescribes.
Other investors echo the pivot from narrow credentials to capability. Chamath Palihapitiya, for one, has urged parents to deprioritize "learn to code" orthodoxy as engineers shift toward supervising AI systems.
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