STORY: :: Meta:: April 29, 2025:: Menlo Park, California:: Meta’s Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Nadella discuss the increasing role of AI in their code:: Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft”So I would say maybe 20, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos (repositories) today and some of our projects are probably all written by software. What about you guys?”:: Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Meta”The big one that we’re focused on is building an AI and machine learning engineer to advance the Llama development itself. Right. Because I mean, our bet is sort of that in the next year probably, you know, I don’t know, maybe half the development is going to be done by AI as opposed to people. And then that will just kind of increase from there.””That to me is, I think, one of the biggest roles of open source, right? Which is to be able to take, let’s say, some of your even inside of the Llama family taking a large model and then to be able to distill it into a smaller model that has even that same model shape. I think is a big use case.””I’ve always been fascinated by this one. I think that distillation is one of the most powerful parts of open source. I mean the distillation, it’s just like it’s magic. I mean, you basically can make it so that you can get 90% or 95% of the intelligence of something that is 20 times larger in a in a form factor that is so much cheaper and more efficient to use. We built this for kind of server production, but a lot of the open source community wants even smaller models. But to be able to basically take whatever intelligence you have from bigger models and distill them into whatever form factor you want to be able to run on your laptop or your phone on whatever, whatever the thing is, I think is just I don’t know. I mean, to me, this is like one of the most important things.”Nadella noted that 20-30% of Microsoft’s code is now generated by AI, while Zuckerberg predicted that AI will handle half of Meta’s software development within a year. Both leaders highlighted the transformative potential of model distillation, a process that reduces large AI models into smaller, more efficient forms for broader accessibility.Meta Platforms on Tuesday announced an application programming interface in a bid to woo businesses to more easily build AI products using its Llama artificial-intelligence models.Llama API, which was unveiled earlier during the event, will help Meta go up against APIs offered by rival model makers including Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Alphabet’s Google and emerging low-cost alternatives such as China’s DeepSeek.The company also released a standalone AI assistant app earlier on Tuesday. It plans to test a paid subscription service of its AI chatbot in the second quarter, Reuters reported in February.Meta releases its Llama models largely free-of-charge for use by developers, a strategy CEO Mark Zuckerberg previously stated will pay off in the form of innovative products, less dependence on would-be competitors and greater engagement on the company’s core social networks.