Mark Zuckerberg wants AI to do half of Meta's coding by 2026

Tonight at LlamaCon, Meta's first inaugural AI developer conference, an interview between Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed just how much of their products' code is written by AI.

During the closing keynote for LlamaCon, Zuckerberg asked Nadella how much code within Microsoft is now written by AI. Nadella's response? "Maybe 20 to 30 percent of the code that is inside of our repos today, and some of our projects, are probably all written by [AI] software."

But when Nadella flipped the question back to Zuckerberg, his estimate for Meta's near future was even higher. Zuckerberg said he didn't have the current numbers off the top of his head, but that "our bet is sort of that in the next year... maybe half the development is going to be done by AI as opposed to people, and that will kind of increase from there." Based on the exchange, it's not entirely clear if Zuckerberg was referring to Llama specifically or Meta overall.

Regardless, that sounds like a big number for a technology that still feels very nascent to the public at large. However, in the tech world, the impressive coding abilities of AI models are being aggressively utilized to generate new code for those same AI models.

For context, Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently revealed that AI generates about a quarter of the company's code (per Engadget). Typically, AI is used to increase human programmers' productivity, sometimes dramatically so, rather than replacing humans entirely.

Later, as the conversation turned towards agentic systems automating more of their respective businesses, Zuckerberg predicted "every engineer is effectively gonna end up being more of like a tech lead" where they each have "their own little army of agents that they work with."

The keynote spanned from the technical, like the current state of agentic AI, to the philosophical, when Nadella called for new ways of measuring AI progress. For instance, he wondered what it would take for AI technology to grow the GDP of the developing world by 10 percent?

As two of the most powerful tech leaders in the world, Zuckerberg and Nadella have strong beliefs in AI's potential and big, global plans to see them through.

Nadella was an interesting choice as the interviewee of the LlamaCon keynote. As the leader of Microsoft, Nadella is heavily intertwined with OpenAI, one of Meta's chief rivals.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.