AI Improves at Improving Itself Using an Evolutionary Trick
36 comments
·June 26, 2025gavinray
tmaly
I followed his work on NEAT at the time. It was really cool. But I never imagined we would get to where we are today with AI.
paulluuk
It's really a choice: do you want to waste compute or do you want to waste potential?
While prioritizing higher scorers for selecting progenitors will initially mitigate some of the problems, you will eventually end up with hundreds of thousands of agents that only learned to repeat the letter "a" a million times in a row, which is a huge waste of processing.
pvg
Discussion of the paper https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44135369
achrono
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".
zack6849
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
achrono
That's a reasonable interpretation, but that is not what Microsoft has said. Satya talks of "30% of the code that is inside of our repos today".
Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-a...
wiz21c
as a regular human he may just have hallucinated :-)
null
bwfan123
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.
rvnx
https://www.google.com/search?q=msft+stock
They never did so well
The issue with Copilot is that it is running GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini, and both models are not good at programming.
davidmurdoch
They clearly mean "new" code. Meaning on any recent day, that amount of code is authored by AI.
achrono
No, because Satya's claim is about "30% of the code that is inside of our repos today".
Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-a...
davidmurdoch
Very clearly not what he meant.
AlienRobot
LLM's next breakthrough will be removing 30% of the code of a codebase.
throwawayoldie
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.
kordlessagain
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
100%? Certain? I disagree, strongly.
cimi_
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
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.
SoftTalker
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.
seydor
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 .
mucha
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.
datameta
I think this is interesting enough for a post in and of itself: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22954
wiz21c
From the article abstract: "All experiments were done with safety precautions (e.g., sandboxing, human oversight)."
Do the authors really believe "safety" is necessary, that is, there is a risk that somethign goes wrong ? What kind of risk ?
datameta
From what I understand, alignment and interpretability were rewarded as part of the optimization function. I think it is prudent that we bake in these "guardrails" early on.
catoc
Number of lines of code… airplane weight… etc
null
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...