Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a bold prediction, saying he believes AI will write most of the company’s code in 12-18 months.

Companies large and small are increasingly relying on AI to help write code and develop their products, and Meta is no exception. In an interview (lightly edited for grammar) with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, Zuckerberg said he believes AI will write the bulk of Meta’s code within the next year and a half.

“We have a big coding effort to. We’re working on a a number of coding agents inside Meta,” Zuckerberg said. “Because we’re not really an enterprise software company, we’re primarily building it for ourselves. Again, we go for a specific goal. We’re not trying to build a general developer tool. We’re trying to build a coding agent and an AI research agent that basically advances Llama research specifically. And it’s fully plugged into our toolchain all that.

“So I think that that’s important and I think it is going to end up being an important part of how this stuff gets done.

“I would guess that sometime in the next 12 to 18 months, we’ll reach the point where most of the code that’s going toward these efforts is written by AI.”

Zuckerberg also made clear that he believes AI’s coding capabilities will develop far beyond what is currently available in that timeframe.

“And I don’t mean autocomplete,” Zuckerberg elaborated. “Today you have good autocomplete. You start writing something it can complete a section of code. I’m talking more like: you give it a goal, it can run tests, it can improve things, it can find issues, it writes higher quality code than the average very good person on the team already. I think that’s going to be a really important part of this for sure.”

Room for Specialization

Zuckerberg also outlined his vision of the AI space, saying he believes it is big enough for there to be room for a number of different specializations.

“But I don’t know if that’s the whole game,” Zuckerberg explained. “I think that is going to be a big industry. I think that’s going to be an important part of how AI gets developed.

“One way to think about this, is this is a massive space. So I don’t think there’s just going to be one company with one optimization function that servers everyone as best as possible. I think that there are a bunch of different labs, that are going to be doing leading work toward different domains. Some are going to be more enterprise-focused or coding-focused. Some will be more productivity-focused. Some will be social or entertainment-focused. Within the assistant space, I think there will be some that are more informational and productivity-focused, and some that are more companion-focused. It’s going to be a lot of stuff that’s just fun and entertaining and shows up in your feed.

“There’s just a huge amount of space. Part of what’s fun about going toward this AGI future is that there are a bunch of common threads for what needs to get invented, but also a lot of things at the end of the day that need to get created. I think you’ll start to see a little more specialization between the groups.”

Conclusion

AI’s coding ability has been growing by leaps and bounds, but Zuckerberg clearly believes there is significant room for further improvement, so much so that it it will be able to code better than the “average very good person on the team.”

If that days comes, AI could finally fulfill its promise of revolutionizing the software development landscape.