James Gosling

James Gosling (born 1955 in Calgary, Canada) designed the Java programming language at Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s. “Write once, run anywhere” made Java the backbone of enterprise software, Android apps, and untold billions of devices, and made Gosling — universally known as the father of Java — one of the most consequential language designers alive. His later career ran through Google, the ocean-robotics startup Liquid Robotics, and Amazon Web Services, where he was a Distinguished Engineer until retiring in 2024.

“Mostly a scam”

Gosling has spent the generative-AI boom playing deflator-in-chief. In his August 2024 essay “Thoughts on GenAI” he wrote that LLMs “do not ‘understand’ or ‘reason’ in any absolute sense,” that the level of “truth” in them is statistical, that conversations with them “feel like conversations with a turbocharged Eliza,” and — flatly — “Of course, it’s a bubble.” In an AWS Community interview he argued the very phrase artificial intelligence “implies something that is false,” preferring to call the systems advanced statistical techniques, and said the one question every developer should ask before using them is “what is your tolerance for error?”

By Java’s 30th-anniversary interviews in May 2025 the language had sharpened: The New Stack reported him calling AI “mostly a scam” and “a marketing term that comes with its own bucket of toxic waste,” blaming venture capitalists who “only care about a successful exit” and predicting most AI investment would be “sucked into a black hole.” He has also dismissed executives’ claims that AI will replace engineers as self-serving.

The nuance: Gosling’s war is with the hype, not the math. He calls the underlying statistics impressive and the tech “pretty cool when used appropriately” — boilerplate generation, first-line support. But between the bubble talk, the scam label, and the scorn for the industry selling it, he stands firmly among the builder-skeptics, alongside contemporaries like Rich Hickey.