Zuckerberg Stunned After Microsoft CEO Admits AI Is Already Writing 30% Of The Company's Code

Blimey! Tech world's gone proper mental after Microsoft's big cheese let slip that artificial intelligence is now churning out nearly a third of the company's code. Word has it that Meta's Mark Zuckerberg was left utterly gobsmacked by the revelation.

During what was meant to be a fairly routine natter at LlamaCon on the 29th of April, Microsoft's head honcho Satya Nadella casually dropped the bombshell that's set Silicon Valley tongues wagging. When Zuckerberg asked how much of Microsoft's programming was now knocked out by AI, Nadella's answer fair knocked the wind out of everyone's sails.

'I'd say maybe 20 to 30 percent of the code that is inside of our repos today in some of our projects are probably all written by software,' Nadella admitted, according to tech rag The Register.

AI Takes The Code Stage: Microsoft's Bold Claim

By 'software,' Nadella wasn't being all mysterious - he was talking about AI systems basically doing what human programmers have been paid obscene amounts to do for decades. The focus was apparently on the firm's storage systems, but bloody hell, that's still a massive chunk of Microsoft's inner workings essentially written by glorified calculators.

Nadella specified that their AI produces new code in several programming languages rather than revising existing code. He noted that the AI-created outcomes he has observed with Python are 'fantastic,' while code developed in C++ still requires further refinement.

This revelation might shed light on recent Windows updates, such as the puzzling empty folder seemingly crucial for system security. However, it remains unclear precisely where this AI-produced code is being implemented.

Furthermore, features like auto-completion in coding software, which operates similarly to predictive text, could also be classified as 'AI-generated,' making that 30% figure somewhat ambiguous.

Microsoft's Bold Prediction And Industry Trend

Nevertheless, Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott has also predicted that a staggering 95% of the company's code will be produced by AI by the year 2030. Moreover, Microsoft isn't the only one depending on AI; TechCrunch has also reported on this growing trend.

Regarding Zuckerberg, when Nadella posed the same question, the Meta chief executive admitted he couldn't recall the precise percentage of AI-created code his organisation is presently utilising.

Zuckerberg mentioned that Meta has teams dedicated to developing auto-coding in areas where the company has a clear record of past modifications. He highlighted that 'the big one we're concentrating on is creating an AI and a machine learning engineer to further the progress of Llama development itself,' The Register reported.

The 40-year-old business magnate said that 'in the next year probably ... half the development is going to be done by AI as opposed to people, and then that will just kind of increase from there.' Nadella then expanded on this, considering if development tools and computing infrastructure should be redesigned to be operated by AI agents.

A Hybrid Of Word, PowerPoint, And Excel Emerges

The head of Microsoft also pondered the increasingly indistinct boundary between documents and applications. He elaborated that his current research method involves utilising an AI chatbot and storing the findings, noting that auto-coding could transform this process into actual software creation.

'This idea that you can start with a high level intent and end up with .... a living artifact that you would have called in the past an application is going to have profound implications on workflows,' Nadella said, as per The Register.

This could also eliminate what he referred to as the 'artificial category boundaries' between documents and apps—an issue he disclosed that Microsoft has attempted to resolve before.

'We used to always think about why Word, Excel, PowerPoint isn't it one thing, and we've tried multiple attempts of it. But now you can conceive of it ... you can start in Word and you can sort of visualise things like Excel and present it, and they can all be persisted as one data structure or what have you. So to me that malleability that was not as robust before is now there,' he said, according to The Register.

This scenario echoes the OpenDoc versus OLE debates of the 1990s—a period when Microsoft and Apple competed over methods for sharing data between applications—now reimagined in the era of artificial intelligence.

Job Security And Code Reliability

Interestingly, neither of the two tech magnates addressed the potential impact of their automated coding initiatives on employment or whether the code produced without human intervention has presented any issues. However, Zuckerberg did express his belief that AI coding offers a chance to enhance security measures.

The revelation gives us mere mortals a rare glimpse at what's really going on behind Microsoft's posh Redmond campus doors. While they've been banging on about AI this and AI that for yonks, not many industry insiders twigged they'd already handed over such a massive portion of their coding duties to the machines.

What's still a bit murky is exactly which bits of code are being bashed out by humans versus their digital understudies. Word is that AI is quite handy at churning out the dull, repetitive coding - the programming equivalent of painting the Forth Bridge - while human programmers still handle the trickier bits that require actual brain power.