Summary
- Microsoft’s CEO believes up to 30% of their code is generated by AI
- AI excels in coding with Python but lags in C++
- Microsoft’s CTO predicts AI will generate 95% of code by 2030.
Generative AI doesn’t advance at the same speed on all fronts. While there are some elements where AI excels, there are others where it’s still learning. Coding has definitely fallen into the former bracket, to the point where there are now plugins where you tell the AI what you want to achieve, and it’ll write the code for you. It can even fix errors you (or it) made, which both lowered the barrier of entry for programmers and put their jobs at risk at the same time.
It makes you think, how much of the code that large businesses rely on was programmed by AI? While it’s near-impossible to tell for sure, Microsoft seems to have a rough idea. The CEO claims that AI has generated up to 30% of the code Microsoft uses, and if the CTO is to be believed, we’ve only just seen the beginning of what’s to come.
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Microsoft’s CEO believes that up to 30% of the company’s code came from AI
As reported by TechCrunch, Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, took a seat beside Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, during Meta’s LlamaCon conference earlier today. The fireside chat featured the two CEOs discussing the state of business for their respective companies, and, as expected, the topic of generative AI in the workplace arose. After all, the two businesses do a lot of programming in the background, so it was interesting to hear how much they both relied on artificial intelligence to get the job done.
Zuckerberg asked Nadella how much of Microsoft’s code is AI-generated, and Nadella stated that he believes the percentage is around 20-30%. He also notes that AI delivered mixed results with different programming languages, excelling the most with Python and lagging behind when asked to code in C++. Nadella then turned the question back to Zuckerberg, who said he had no idea how much of Meta’s code was AI-generated.
As TedhCrunch notes, Microsoft is definitely a huge supporter of coding with AI. Its CTO, Kevin Scott, believes that AI will generate 95% of all code by 2030, but also feels that “the more important and interesting part of authorship is still going to be entirely human.” As such, Scott doesn’t believe that human jobs are completely at risk yet.
If you’d like to learn more about how AI can help you code, check out our piece on using ChatGPT to program in Python, C, and Java.
