AI Contributes to 25% of Google's New Code, CEO Sundar Pichai Confirms

[AleksandarK]

During Alphabet's Q3 earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai announced that AI now generates more than a quarter of the company's new code, marking a significant milestone for AI advancement and for the tech giant. This development comes alongside impressive financial results, with the company reporting $88.2 billion in revenue, representing a 15% year-over-year increase. Implementing AI in code generation has raised concerns, though Google maintains rigorous safety protocols. Every AI-generated code segment undergoes thorough review by human (natural intelligence) engineers before deployment, ensuring quality and security standards are met. This hybrid approach helps Google balance productivity with reliability. The tech giant's commitment to AI development extends beyond code generation.

Recent achievements include the revolutionary AI Overviews feature, which has undergone significant optimization. Through optimizing hardware solutions and technical improvements, Google has managed to reduce query costs by over 90% while simultaneously doubling the capacity of their custom Gemini models. Google's AI push has also garnered prestigious recognition, with DeepMind researchers Demis Hassabis and John Jumper receiving the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their groundbreaking AlphaFold project. Former Google researcher Geoff Hinton also achieved Nobel recognition in Physics. The impact of Google's AI integration is evident across its product ecosystem, with Gemini models now powering seven platforms that each serve over two billion monthly users. Google Maps recently joined this elite group, while the company has expanded its AI capabilities to external developers through partnerships with platforms like GitHub Copilot to help developers write code with AI assistance.



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[azrael]

I'm not confident in these "rigorous safety protocols". Being a developer myself, I'm also loathe to trust code and business logic to a 3rd party, albeit that particular issue doesn't exist for Google.

 

[AleksandarK]

I'm not confident in these "rigorous safety protocols". Being a developer myself, I'm also loathe to trust code and business logic to a 3rd party, albeit that particular issue doesn't exist for Google.

To be completely transparent, I am also and engineer and I would like to have AI do the bulk of work, and for me to piece it all together. Would improve productivity and I can stress test it for bugs.

 

[Vayra86]

To be completely transparent, I am also and engineer and I would like to have AI do the bulk of work, and for me to piece it all together. Would improve productivity and I can stress test it for bugs.

Yeah I think if you use it responsibly, AI can free your hands to focus on higher quality instead of losing quality assurance.

Requires skilled user nonetheless. And policy that supports such use.

 

[MacZ]

During Alphabet's Q3 earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai announced that AI now generates more than a quarter of the company's new code, marking a significant milestone for AI advancement and for the tech giant. This development comes alongside impressive financial results, with the company reporting $88.2 billion in revenue, representing a 15% year-over-year increase

First, there is the claim of 25% of new code made by AI just next to the financial results. Could make you think that the two are related when Pichai never said that. It seems manipulative.

Then, 25% of how much ? How much was new compared to the installed code base ? 10% ? 5% ? 1% ? Don't know.

Then Pichai that it allowed the engineers at Google to do more. How much more ? 25 % ? 10 % ? 5 % ? 1 % ? Don't know.

Google has every incentive to twist the truth to recoup the billions its company has invested in AI.

But maybe we can use AI to report news, because I think that all it takes is cheerleading whatever someone says, a ML algorithm can do it just fine.

 

[Prima.Vera]

That might explain why Google search has recently gone to toilet and fake website are now prioritized in the results.

 

[Fourstaff]

Its so much easier to ask ChatGPT to write code and then edit than to write from scratch.

 

[unwind-protect]

Not all programming jobs at Google are some kind of ninja coding. There are a lot of jobs that consist of copying data from one protobuffer to another.

Mind you, there is a lot of boilerplate around those simple copying operations, and boilerplate code is ideal for AI.

That doesn't mean that AI here advances the state of software.

 

[the54thvoid]

Some OT posts removed. The topic is AI.