Yann Lecun, the 65-year-old NYU professor who is regarded as one of the “godfathers” of AI, has some advice for students who are looking to get in the field of artificial intelligence. “If you are a CS major and take the minimum required math courses for the typical CS curriculum, you might find yourself unable to adapt to major technological shifts,” Lecun told Business Insider. During an almost two-hour-long podcast called The Information Bottleneck on YouTube, Yann Lecun said students should focus on things with a “long shelf life” like mathematics, physics or engineering, signal processing, control theory, and optimisation. “The disciplines with the longest shelf life are usually not computer science. Physics and engineering teach you how to model reality, and that’s what intelligence is really about,” says Lecun. While universities and computer science students are trying to grapple with and adapt to generative and agentic AI, students still seem to be having trouble finding a job. The NYU professor said that he did not initially study computer science but was enrolled in electrical …