Should Children Use ChatGPT? EPAM Co-founder Leonid Lozner Reflects
EPAM Systems co-founder, physicist, and venture investor Leonid Lozner explained why one shouldn't choose a profession solely based on the advent of AI, why children need to know how to build a hut in the forest, and why ChatGPT can be dangerous for the development of children's thinking.
Leonid Lozner. Photo: bel.biz
Leonid Lozner was born in Minsk. After graduating from school, he enrolled in the Physics Faculty of BSU and built a scientific career at the Institute of Physics of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, focusing on the automation of physical processes. He has repeatedly noted that science was his true calling.
However, after the collapse of the USSR, funding for physical science, which was largely oriented towards the military-industrial complex, almost ceased. Therefore, when in 1993 his school friend Arkadiy Dobkin offered Lozner to co-found EPAM Systems, he agreed.
In the initial stage, Lozner was responsible for forming the engineering team. According to his own words, he personally hired the company's first two hundred employees. EPAM's first office was located in the basement of Lozner's home in Minsk, while Dobkin's American office was in his apartment in New Jersey.
Over two decades, the company grew into one of the world leaders in software development, and in 2012, it went public on the New York Stock Exchange. Even during the preparation for the IPO, Lozner left the operational management of the company, remaining a shareholder and focusing on new projects.
After leaving EPAM, Lozner engaged in venture investments and educational projects. He invested in several technology startups, supported initiatives in school STEM education, children's robotics, and science popularization.
However, Lozner is known not only as an entrepreneur. In the early 1990s, he worked as a DJ on Radio "B-A" and wrote texts about music for the program "To Youth About Musical Art," which aired on the First Channel of Belarusian Radio. Lozner is also the author of the book "The Beatles: A History in Songs," dedicated to the work of the legendary band.
Leonid Lozner currently lives in Latvia, practices vibe-coding, and actively practices yoga. Despite the rapid development of artificial intelligence, he believes that one should not choose a profession solely based on whether automation will affect it. If a person already knows what they want to do, they should dedicate themselves to that very endeavor—even if it is considered risky from the perspective of potential displacement by artificial intelligence.
"But then you need to put your heart, strength, and energy into it and try to become a master of that craft during your years of study," Lozner adds in an interview.
Children and ChatGPT
Leonid Lozner does not have a definitive answer regarding the age at which a child should start using ChatGPT. In his opinion, today's discussion closely resembles the debates held a few years ago about when a child could be given a tablet.
Lozner believes that future success awaits those who can combine traditional skills with new technologies.
"The ability to build a hut from branches, light a fire, and survive a night in a winter forest, from my point of view, is as inherently important for a person as new skills," he notes.
At the same time, Lozner is convinced that abusing ChatGPT will hinder the development of thinking skills.
However, according to Lozner, this does not mean that such tools should be abandoned. He himself regularly uses artificial intelligence—specifically, the Perplexity service when he wants to quickly obtain necessary information. Therefore, the main thing, in his opinion, is to find a reasonable balance between independent thinking and the use of AI. How exactly to achieve this, Lozner does not yet know.
"The question is very complex. I don't have an answer to it. But I am absolutely sure that knowing the multiplication table and at least fundamentally keeping the table of irregular English verbs in mind is very useful," he notes.
Elaborating on this idea, Lozner refers to the ideas of French psychologist Jean Piaget. In his interpretation of Piaget's theory, he says that first a child "builds shelves," and only then "places knowledge on them."
"Without these shelves, there will be nowhere to put knowledge. And in this sense, ChatGPT, understood broadly, is dangerous because these shelves may not appear at all," Lozner believes.