I don't think I've shared the story too many times, but you're probably the first person, like seven years ago, I was asking what do you think is coming down the pike and you just shook your head. I still remember this moment so distinctly and you said everything is going to get turned upside down with AI and people have no idea. And that's because you were working on a lot of this stuff back then and you had a front row seat to it. Tell us a little bit about where we are right now and how you're seeing this thing kind of lay out and did you think this, are you surprised with any of it?
Yeah, I mean, it's hard not to be surprised. I think things have accelerated probably faster than I was expecting. So, like none of this stuff is surprising, like what is happening. I think it was relatively clear even those like seven years ago when we were having these conversations that scaling laws were going to work and that the models and the systems that we built around them were going to be very, very powerful in a general sense and they were going to behave like a platform and people were going to be able to build lots of exciting things on top of them. So, it was just a question of how fast is all of this stuff going to happen? And I think it's happening faster than I would have predicted, but what's happening doesn't seem too terribly surprising. And I think the things that are ahead of us are, I'm sure you all have been talking about this already. We really are not yet at the point of diminishing marginal return on the capability increases in the platform infrastructure that is powering all of this change.
But at the same time there's a capabilities overhang where people are using...
Oh, 100%, yeah. I've been like beating the drum about this inside and outside of Microsoft for a few years. The models are already way more powerful than what people are using them for. I think the closest glimpse that you're seeing to true, full utilization of model capability is in coding and it's an absolute frenzy right now in the state of software development. You have very, very senior people and the best coders you've ever met in your life who are just completely overwhelmed trying to keep up with the rate of progress that's happening right now.
Simulate that out. What happens? Does a software engineering job, how does it change in the next...
Well, I think it becomes more of what a good software engineer, good software engineers have always done. It's less about the mechanics of what characters are coming off of your keyboard and going into a text editor and more about do you really understand what it is that you're building and why and how is value being created and how can you move faster and recognizing what value you're creating for people and just sort of accelerating that rate of improvement. That's what the best software engineers that you and I have always worked with have been able to do. And I think that is still going to be very true. It's critically true right now because you can produce a lot of code with these coding agents right now. There's nothing to say that it's good code. So you can just sort of spray a bunch...
Code review has become the bottleneck.
Yeah. No, review is a bottleneck and people need to really make sure that they're not getting confused between activity and progress. I mean, and it's been the hard thing. I've been managing software engineering teams for a very long, like 25 years now I think. And over that 25 years, I don't think any of us have ever really been able to say what constitutes actual engineering productivity. And there's some things that you can obviously speed up a lot with AI systems and you can really see it with startups. So there are these startups that are getting funded with an order of magnitude less money than they would have just two years ago with very small teams doing crazy amounts of work and moving very quickly and that's super, super exciting. But it really is going to put the focus on choice and taste and understanding of your problem domain, your customer and what you're trying to do. That's the really, critically important thing now.
And do you think the roles in the software development life cycle will fuse and change and merge?
Yeah. Look, and it's always changed. What I hope, honestly, this is Kevin's opinion, not Microsoft's opinion. But yeah, I've been grumpy, like an old fart for a whole bunch of years now that we have turned computer science education into vocational education. Students go get a CS degree because they want to learn how to be programmers and what I want people to go back to is learning how to be computer scientists.
Yeah. Can you think algorithmically? Do you know how to decompose problems? Do you know how to choose the right problem to go spend your time and energy on? Do you understand how the science of what you're doing fits into society and into the broader ecosystem of science that's happening around you? Do you possess the capability and the curiosity to punch down through the layers of abstraction to debug what's going on when the machine doesn't give you the result that you want? I mean, all of those things are the critically important things and I think we'll get back to a lot of that because a bunch of the vocational aspects of the software engineering job are just going to change so radically over the next handful of years that it's going to be unrecognizable.
Now, you've spent a fair amount of time thinking about the future and the good and the bad. So, paint out two futures for us. The fundamentally optimistic one with AI and one where it doesn't go quite the way that we would like it to go. And then I want to talk about Microsoft and how you folks are kind of working with that.
Yeah. So look, I think the optimistic story is probably the more likely one because it's going to be the necessary thing that has to happen. And so, it starts with a thing that doesn't sound optimistic, but I was chatting with a friend the other day who runs one of the premier educational institutions in Japan. And he said this thing sort of off-handed to me that took me aback and he was like, 'Yeah, this year is peak high school graduation in Japan.' So, Japan will graduate as many high school students as they're ever going to graduate in a single year this year. Which means from here on out fewer high school seniors graduating, fewer going to college and it goes down and there's nothing to do about it. Unless you do some crazy thing with immigration and there's just, by looking at what the birth rates are, that's just precipitously going to go down.
Is it because of the demographics?
Just pure demographics in Japan.
Pure, pure demographics. And so we know in abstract, the demographic data is super clear that Japan is in population decline. It's a little bit ahead of where other places are but China, Korea as well, a bunch of countries in Western Europe, the United States sans immigration would also be in population decline over the next handful of decades. And so you have this aging population.
It's actually a much, much bigger issue than people have.
Yeah. No. And you can even see it in the United States. There are these rural places like where my mom lives where the population is aging faster because the demographics are kind of unfavorable in rural parts of the country. And it really has these massive implications that we don't talk about all that much. One of the implications is if you don't have as many people to do the work and you have more people who are going to create new forms of work for society to take care of this elderly population that is growing very, very rapidly. Something has to happen with the very nature of how you get work done and what productivity looks like in order for you to maintain just the level of quality of life in society and what we think of as normal in society. And it doesn't happen for free. And so you have to have technological interventions. This is always the way that we've solved our productivity problems as a species. And so I think the optimistic case is like, thank god AI has come along when it has. That we actually have this and a handful of other technological things happening in the world right now that will give us at least a partial answer for what you do when over the next handful of decades you don't have the same labor dynamics as you've had over the whole course of recorded human history.
Yeah. It's like a crazy thing that's happening that we just don't talk about all that much.
And AI becomes that kind of unlock that you need otherwise... and look, it can't do everything and it's not a substitute for all of the things that human beings do. I don't think anybody here wants it to be. But it gives us an option for how do you go sort out some of these crazy problems that otherwise would be very zero sum and very, very challenging and destabilizing. And so I am optimistic that we can put our heads together, identify all of those things that feel zero sum, we need to turn them into non-zero sum problems and then go tackle them and have the good sense to have taste about how you put the technology into practice. So that's the optimistic case. The pessimistic case, I won't give you the one, you can just sort of pick your, there's a pallet of them right now.
Yeah. Or many, many things. So my pessimistic scenario is that we get into some superficial mode about AI that instead of using it to go solve some of these super important problems with urgency, that we use it to just further distract ourselves and a bunch of superficial... I look at my kids, they're half and half. Half the time they're using AI in really super ambitious ways to do things with the biomedical engineering projects they're working on or whatever their technical fascination is and they're just way ahead of where I was when I was their age. And then the other half of the time they're using it to make pictures of green llamas with big butts that they paste someone's face on and it's like, okay, that's a good use of compute resource.
That's a good use of compute resource.
Yeah, right. My GPUs are on fire and this is why. So I hope that we can resist the temptation to make the whole narrative about AI is like, okay, well here's the new sensational thing that happened over the weekend or the new way that a bunch of powerful people are going to throw darts at each other and we can just make it more about what does society really need from this technology.
How long have you been at Microsoft now?
