Gabe Newell thinks AI tools will result in a 'funny situation' where people who don't know how to program become 'more effective developers of value' than those who've been at it for a decade

Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve Corporation, recently gave an interview to YouTuber Zalkar Saliev. The full interview is yet to surface but a few shorts from the conversation have been released, including one about Newell's daily routine ("get up, work, go scuba diving"), and his thoughts on why startups chasing VC money makes no sense.

Newell is asked at one point about the hot topic of the moment: AI. It's a field rife with promises, where the ultimate white whale is the search for artificial general intelligence (AGI), and there's little agreement on the best use cases for the technology as it is now.

"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," says Newell. "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."

It's no surprise that Newell is generally positive on AI: this is a man who loves new technology, who's pushed Valve into various technical fields (some with enormous success, some not so much), and who co-founded Starfish Neuroscience, a company focused on neural interfaces.

But it is perhaps worth adding a note of caution to his generally rosy view on how programmers and AI will interact: such as this story from a few days ago, in which 200 staff laid-off from King are being replaced by the AI tools they helped build.

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."