Comment by jodrellblank 12 hours ago
The original claims were not ambigious, it's "My" goal not "Microsoft's goal".
The fact that it's a "PR disaster" for a researcher to have an ambitious project at one of the biggest tech companies on the planet, or to talk up their team on LinkedIn, is unbelievably ridiculous.
You suppose that there are no highly-paid researchers on the planet working on AGI? Because there are, and that's less proven than "porting one codebase to another language" is. What about Quantum Computers, what about power-producing nuclear fusion? Both less proven than porting code. What about all other blue-sky research labs?
Why would you continue supposing such a thing when both the employee, and the employer, have said that your suppositions are wrong?
Sure, there are plenty of researchers working on fanciful daydreams. They pursue those goals at behest of their employer. You attempted to make a distinction between the employer and the employee's goals, as though a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft was just playing around on a whim doing hobby projects for fun. If Microsoft is paying him $1m annually to work on this, plus giving him a team to pursue the goal of rewriting Windows, it is not inaccurate to state that Microsoft's goal is to completely rewrite Windows with LLMs, and they will earn negative publicity for making that fact public. The project will likely fail given how ridiculous it is, but it is still a goal they are funding.
One supposes, when a highly senior employee publicly talks about project goals in recruitment material, that they are not fancifully daydreaming about something that can never happen but are in fact actually talking about the work they're doing that justifies their ~$1,000,000/yr compensation in the eyes of their employer.
Talking about rewriting Windows at a rate of 1 million lines of code per engineer per month with LLMs is absolutely going to garner negative publicity, no matter how much you spin it with words like "ambitious" (do you work in PR? it sounds like it's your calling).