Generative ‘AI’ isn’t just useful for making bad writing and bad images, it can be used to make software code, too. (I’ll refrain from judging it as bad or good — I’m a writer and a graphic designer, but I can’t code my way out of a wet paper bag.) In fact, Microsoft’s CEO claims that up to 30 percent of the company’s new code is now created with artificial intelligence.
Satya Nadella made this claim at LlamaCon (around the 45:00 minute mark), Meta/Facebook’s conference focusing on generative AI tools. In fact Nadella was opposite Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and controversy lightning rod, when he said as much yesterday.
“Code reviews are very high,” says Nadella. “In fact the agents we have for reviewing code, that usage has increased, and so I would say maybe 20, 30 percent of the code that is inside of our repos today and in some of our projects are probably all written by software.”
That’s a pretty stunning claim, and as Tom’s Hardware points out, it seems in line with similar claim from Google CEO Sundar Pichai made last year. But I’ll highlight that this is an executive at a company that’s pushing hard on selling AI tools, talking to another executive pushing for AI tools, at an AI conference. All three of these figures are, shall we say, somewhat less than objective.
Microsoft’s Copilot AI tools, which use OpenAI’s ChatGPT as its primary tie-in, are being baked into pretty much every one of its products. Between Windows 11, the Edge browser, Office, and dedicated Copilot buttons on new laptop keyboards, it seems like an inescapable bull rush of both development and marketing. But behind the scenes, Microsoft seems less bullish on AI where the money is concerned, scaling back its leases on the data centers that power such tools.
Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer, PCWorld
Michael is a 10-year veteran of technology journalism, covering everything from Apple to ZTE. On PCWorld he's the resident keyboard nut, always using a new one for a review and building a new mechanical board or expanding his desktop "battlestation" in his off hours. Michael's previous bylines include Android Police, Digital Trends, Wired, Lifehacker, and How-To Geek, and he's covered events like CES and Mobile World Congress live. Michael lives in Pennsylvania where he's always looking forward to his next kayaking trip.