Peter Norvig: Rewire software engineering for agentic AI

The useful part

What comes next after a moment when companies sell existential risk but pursue public funding and DIY regulation, even as software developers question their life choices? Peter Norvig, distinguished education fellow at Stanford HAI and former Google research director, used his opening keynote at The AI Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday to speculate on the answer. Almost certainly, it's another AI conference – on Thursday in fact – given the two or three dozen of them that have bubbled up in San Francisco this year or are scheduled in the remaining three months.

How it works

• How do we capture this theory of the evolving program that we're not capturing well now?" To illustrate that point, Norvig recounted some of his recent work.
• Then he mused that if you have enough storage and memory, maybe it would be useful to have those files to have a more thorough history of how the codebase changed.
• "So the expectations of what's good practice and how that's going to change, that's all going to be different," he said.
• "We gotta get the security and privacy and data pipelines and supply chains, those are all gonna be different in how they interact with each other," he said.

What to take from it

He acknowledged the milestones of AlexNet and ImageNet in 2012, the Transformer architecture for machine learning in 2017, the debut of ChatGPT in 2022, and the emergence of reasoning and coding agents in 2024. REG AD Norvig went on to cite Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds' changing attitude toward AI. "Six months ago he was a skeptic, he became a cautious adopter, and now he's a dogmatic advocate," said Norvig.

Example or evidence

• Peter Norvig says all aboard for AI coding Jump to main content REG AD ai and ml Peter Norvig says all aboard for AI coding Software engineering practices need to catch up with increasingly capable agents...
• He told Codex to send the pull request for review, and his colleague asked why he was checking in 6,000 temp files.
• "And sure enough, I had written 6,000 temporary files, and Codex thought that it wanted to check those in.
• So I told [Codex], 'No, don't check them in, just delete them.' At first I thought, shame on me.

Details worth keeping

To get to the present, he took a detour through the past. REG AD He also touched on the sudden competency of AI models for math, noting that two years ago, GPT-4 couldn't count the number of "r"s in "strawberry." Yet as of August this year, he observed, 25 percent of math preprint papers on arXiv acknowledged AI assistance. Norvig says the process of software engineering needs to change.

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