TAI LabsInterview

25 minutes with Alphabet's Chairman

The man who built modern computing on whether AI takes your job

Everyone keeps saying AI is coming for coding jobs. We asked John L. Hennessy — Turing Award winner, former Stanford President, Chairman of Alphabet — whether that's actually true. His answer surprised us.

Sign up to watch

Enter your email and we'll send you the interview link. You can also watch it right away after signing up.

No spam. We'll email you the watch link and occasional TAI Labs updates.

What you'll walk away with

  • Why programmer employment went up in the year everyone called coding dead
  • The simple economics question that decides whether AI takes your job
  • What “human-centred AI” actually means — in plain English
  • Why AI can’t be locked down the way nuclear weapons were
  • How close free, open AI models now are to the expensive ones
  • The two skills he says stay valuable for life, whatever AI does next

About the guest

John L. Hennessy

Chairman of Alphabet (Google's parent company). Former President of Stanford. Turing Award winner for the chip design inside almost every phone on earth. In July 2026 he received the Marconi Society Lifetime Achievement Award.

We sat with him for 25 minutes: whether a CS degree is still worth it, which AI tool he uses every day, why you cannot control AI the way the world controlled nuclear weapons — and the ninth-grade teacher who told his parents he had a lazy brain.