Microsoft will soon stop hiring programmers who don’t use AI

Investments in AI programming assistants have reached nearly $1 billion since the beginning of last year. Microsoft, Amazon and Google have entered the race for leadership in this segment, introducing technology into their products, which is already bringing significant profits to both companies and developers. Moreover, Microsoft said that it will soon stop hiring programmers who do not use AI assistants.

Image source: Copilot

AI programming assistant companies such as Replit, Anysphere, Magic, Augment, Supermaven and Poolside AI have raised $433 million this year alone, adding up to nearly $1 billion in funding last year. programming assistants indicates that coding may be the first area to be significantly transformed by the latest wave of AI technologies.

«Today, software engineering and programming are the number one field impacted by AI, said Hadi Partovi, CEO of educational nonprofit Code.org, a longtime investor in Silicon Valley projects and an advisor to Airbnb, Uber, Dropbox and Facebook✴ . “Today, programming without AI is a bit like writing without a word processor.”

Interestingly, the growing confidence in the benefits of AI coding contrasts with questions from some investors about the economic benefits of generative AI and the likely return on the projected trillions of dollars of Big Tech investments in computing infrastructure to support this technology in the coming years. But while some investors doubt the economic benefits of AI and the return on Big Tech’s investment in its infrastructure, confidence is growing in Silicon Valley.

Hannah Seal, a partner at Index Ventures, which invested in startup Augment, said that “it’s much easier to monetize AI if you can embed your product into an existing workflow and make all the benefits instantly visible.” For her, the questions of monetizing AI tools are: “What is the time to profit and how meaningful are those profits?” However, she notes that with AI coding assistants such questions no longer arise.

Enthusiasm for AI has prompted startups and tech giants Microsoft, Amazon, Meta✴ and Google to compete for dominance in the crowded sector by creating AI assistants and agents that can write and edit program code. In fact, the head of Code.org’s board of directors, which includes David Treadwell, Amazon’s e-commerce chief, and Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, recently told Partovi that the company would stop hiring by the end of the year. , which program without using AI.

To recap, GitHub, a pioneer in AI coding, was one of the first to integrate large language models (LLMs) into its products. “When we started using GPT-3, we quickly realized that it wrote code very well and decided to build GitHub Copilot on top of it,” said Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub. GitHub Copilot, launched in 2022, already has nearly 2 million paid subscribers and, according to Dohmke, writes much better code than the average developer.

Image source: GitHub

GitHub’s revenue as of April was up 45% from last year, and according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, GitHub’s annual revenue was $2 billion as of the beginning of this month. “Copilot has caused more than 40 % of GitHub’s revenue growth this year and is already larger than GitHub’s entire business since its acquisition,” Nadella said.

However, IT departments at large companies still have some concerns about the security of using automated programming tools to create production-ready code. Dohmke emphasized that one should not yet expect the implementation of artificial intelligence-generated code without manual testing.