WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 44387719

(no title)

achrono | 8 months ago

I wish an org like IEEE would be way more rigorous than what's revealed with the first paragraph:

>In April, Microsoft’s CEO said that artificial intelligence now wrote close to a third of the company’s code. Last October, Google’s CEO put their number at around a quarter. Other tech companies can’t be far off.

Take a moment to reflect -- a third of the company's code? Generative AI capable enough to write reasonable code has arguably not been around longer than 5 years. In the 50 years of Microsoft, have the last 5 years contributed to a third of the total code base? This itself would require that not a single engineer write a single line of code in these 5 years.

Okay, maybe Microsoft meant to say new/incremental code?

No, because Satya is reported to have said, "I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today [...] written by software".

discuss

order

bwfan123|8 months ago

If a third of microsoft's code looks like this copilot generated PR [1] the company is going to go down the tubes soon. And I hope this happens, so, these corporate chiefs learn a harsh lesson when they are ejected for forcing stupidity across the org.

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115762

zack6849|8 months ago

I'm pretty sure they meant 1/3rd of newly written code, obviously they don't mean a third of all their code that exists was written by AI

throwawayoldie|8 months ago

It's not his job to accurately report numbers, or really to do anything that involves technical acumen. His job is more akin to being a cheerleader, or a carnival barker.

cimi_|8 months ago

They probably mean new code not the entire codebase, but even so I think those numbers are ridiculous given my experience.

Is there any evidence of this (anywhere, not just MS or Google)?

paulluuk|8 months ago

I'm not sure if it's ridiculous if you factor in something like copilot. Heck, even just your IDE's built-in autocomplete (which only finishes the current variable name) can get close to being responsible for 20% of your code, with tools like copilot I think you can even more easily hit that target.

kordlessagain|8 months ago

Are we really sitting here dissecting what he's saying as if it means anything at all for the future? 20% or 30% today is 100% tomorrow. That much is certain.

AnimalMuppet|8 months ago

100%? Certain? I disagree, strongly.

SoftTalker|8 months ago

I've always interpreted that as "a third of the company’s (new) code" though I guess it would be nice of them to make that clear.

exe34|8 months ago

Maybe they've had LLMs for a very long time, given the quality of their code...

seydor|8 months ago

newly writte code. But the consensus is that this is inflated numbers that don't involve the revisions that this code needs. Would be interesting for them to tell us what % of the LLM generated code gets thrown away .

bee_rider|8 months ago

I mean… it is objectively the truth to quote the CEO of MS as saying what he said, whether or not he is lying or using a misleading metric. The only questionable things about the quote, imo, are

> Other tech companies can’t be far off.

First, MS and Google are working on coding assistants so I’d expect them to be quite ahead of the curve in terms of what their CEOs report. Both in terms of what they are actually doing (since they have a bunch of people working there who are interested in AI coding assistants, surely they are using them). And in terms of that the head advertisers for these products, the CEOs are willing to say (although I should be clear, I’m not even necessarily saying he’s lying or being misleading. He’s in charge of a company that is advertising some AI tool, maybe all his reports are also emphasizing how good the dogfood is).

Second and relatedly, quoting a AI tool salesman on how much of his company’s code is written by AI… eh, it is a big company, the CEO of MS is a known figure. But maybe they should be explicitly skeptical toward him. As you note, I wouldn’t be surprised if MS was itself far off from what he said in the quote, let alone other companies…

Although, if he says:

> "I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today [...] written by software".

Depending on how you look at it, that doesn’t necessarily preclude, like, classic macros and other classic code generation tools, so actually I have no idea what it even means. If an AI touches a JavaScript minifier, does it get credit for all the JavaScript that gets generated by it? Haha.