More and more tech companies are coming out with numbers of just how much of their code generation is now automated.
Days after Google CEO Sundar Pichai had said that “well over 30%” of the code at Google was now being written by AI, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has come up with a similar number. Nadella said that as much as 30 percent of the code at Microsoft was being written by AI.
“I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software,” Nadella said in a conversation with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Nadella asked Zuckerberg how much of Meta’s code was being written by AI. Zuckerberg said he didn’t know the exact figure off the top of his head, but he said Meta is building an AI model that can in turn build future versions of the company’s Llama family of AI models. “Our bet is sort of that in the next year probably … maybe half the development is going to be done by AI, as opposed to people, and then that will just kind of increase from there,” Zuckerberg said. Just yesterday, Zuckerberg had said on the Dwarkesh podcast that he expected that most of the coding work on building AI agents and AI research would be done by AI in the next 12-18 months.
This means that three top tech companies — Google, Meta and Microsoft — now seem to be saying that a significant portion of their code is being automatically written by AI. These companies haven’t yet let go of any human workers, but it does seem inevitable that it will happen. If the world doesn’t have an inexhaustible need for software, and the number of human coders required to write code continues to diminish, it does seem to logically follow that the there will be fewer coders and programmers required going around. Some companies have gone ahead and said as much — Inmobi says that 80% of its code will be written by AI by the end of the year, which means people will lose jobs, and Klarna had Salesforce have paused hiring software engineers given the gains they’re seeing from AI. These are still early days in the AI revolution — ChatGPT was released just 2.5 years ago — and there’s no telling how much coding could end up changing in the years to come.