Satya Nadella says AI is now writing 30% of Microsoft’s code but real change is still many years away – News

Marc Andreessen famously said that software is eating the world, but now it seems that software itself is on the menu, with artificial intelligence taking a huge bite into the business of creating it.

According to Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Satya Nadella, as much as 30% of all of the code inside the company’s software repositories was “written by software” powered by AI.

Nadella made the revelation while speaking to Meta Platforms Inc. founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg during a fireside chat at the inaugural LlamaCon conference today, as part of a wide ranging discussion on the speed of AI’s development and its impact on the world.

The Microsoft boss was responding to a question from Zuckerberg, who asked him directly how much of the company’s code was AI-generated. But he said the company still has a lot of work to do, for it’s seeing mixed results overall. While the quality of its AI-generated Python code is pretty high, it’s not quite as good when writing in the C++ programming language, Nadella admitted.

Nadella’s response suggests that Microsoft is more or less on an equal footing with rival Google LLC. During an earnings call last week, Google boss Sundar Pichai told analysts that he believes AI is now generating just over 30% of the company’s code.

That said, it’s not clear what yardsticks Microsoft and Google are using to estimate the percentage of AI-written code, so the numbers they suggest are likely just rough guidelines at best.

Still, both companies may well be doing better than Meta. When Nadella asked Zuckerberg the same question, the Meta CEO admitted that he doesn’t have any clue about how much of its code is AI-generated.

Earlier this year, Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott said he believes more than 95% of all code will be written by AI in 2030, so algorithms still have a way to go if they’re to live up to that forecast.

The conversation later turned to the CEOs’ expectations of how long it might take until AI truly starts “eating the world,” and Nadella was surprisingly conservative in his response.

Zuckerberg talked about how there’s currently a lot of hype around AI, and stressed that if it’s really going to lead to massive gains in productivity, this needs to be measurable in terms of “major increases in GDP.” He added that he believes it’s going to take “multiple years, many years to play out,” before asking Nadella for his view on what people should be looking at to understand the progress AI is making.

Nadella likened the rise of AI to the emergence of electricity, and said that although the technology is showing lots of promise, it’s yet to deliver much of a meaningful change in productivity. “That requires software and also management change,” he said. “Because in some sense, people have to work with it differently.”

The Microsoft boss said it took around 50 years before the bulk of the world’s factories learned how to take advantage of electricity to increase productivity.

Although very few expect we’ll have to wait that long until we see major changes resulting from AI, Zuckerberg did seem a tad concerned by what he was told. “Well, we’re all investing now as if it’s not going to take 50 years, so I hope it doesn’t take 50 years,” he said.

Zuckerberg’s and Nadella’s full chat can be watched in this video:

Image: Meta Platforms