Discussion of the paper https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44135369
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".
What Satya says: “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,”
First line from the article: In April, Microsoft’s CEO said that artificial intelligence now wrote close to a third of the company’s code.
Software != AI
Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-a...
CNBC misquotes Satya in the same article with his actual quote.
I think this is interesting enough for a post in and of itself: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22954
Number of lines of code… airplane weight… etc
There's an interesting parallel to be drawn here from prior RL research:
Kenneth Stanley[0], the creator of the NEAT[1]/HyperNEAT (Picbreeder) algorithms wrote an entire book about open-ended exploration, "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective".[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Stanley
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroevolution_of_augmenting_t...