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Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

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Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#531

I work for Google, and I just got done with my work day. I was just writing I guess what you'd call "AI generated code." But the code completion engine is basically just good at finishing the lines I'm writing. If I'm writing "function getAc..." it's smart enough to complete to "function getActionHandler()", and maybe suggest the correct arguments and a decent jsdoc comment. So basically, it's a helpful productivity…

Do people find these AI auto complete things helpful? I was trying the XCode one and it kept suggesting API calls that don't exist. I spent more time fixing its errors than I would have spent typing the correct API call.

I find the simpler engines work better.

I want the end of the line completed with focus on context from the working code base, and I don't want an entire 5 line function completed with incomplete requirements.

It is really impressive when it implements a 5 line function correctly, but its like hitting the lottery

Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#532

Hi, I lead the teams responsible for our internal developer tools, including AI features. We work very closely with Google DeepMind to adapt Gemini models for Google-scale coding and other Software Engineering usecases. Google has a unique, massive monorepo which poses a lot of fun challenges when it comes to deploying AI capabilities at scale. 1. We take a lot of care to make sure the AI recommendations are safe and…

You mention safety as #1, but my impression is that Google has taken a uniquely primitive approach to safety with many of their models. Instead of influencing the weights of the core model, they check core model outputs with a tiny and much less competent “safety model”. This approach leads to things like a text-to-image model that refuses to output images when a user asks to generate “a picture of a child playing hopscotch in front of their school, shot with a Sony A1 at 200 mm, f2.8”. Gemini has similar issue: it will stop mid-sentence, erase its entire response and then claim that something is likely offensive and it can’t continue.

The whole paradigm should change. If you are indeed responsible for developer tools, I would hope that you’re activity leveraging Claude 3.5 Sonnet and o1-preview.

Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you spot all the problems? You were probably being rhetorical, but there are two problems: - `p = 2` should be outside the loop - `prime_factors.append(n)` appends `1` onto the end of the list for no reason With those two changes I'm pretty sure it's correct.

You don't need to append 'p' in the inner while loop more than once. Maybe instead of an array for keeping the list of prime factors do it in a set.

It’s valid to return the multiplicity of each prime, depending on the goal of this.

Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or alternatively you don't know how to use AI to help you code and are in the 2020s equivalent of the 'Why do I need google when I have the yellow pages?' phase a lot of adults went through in the 2000s. This is not a bad thing since you can improve, but constantly dismissing something that a lot of people are finding an amazing productivity boost should give you some pause.

It's like blockchain right now. I'm sure there is some killer feature that can justify its problem space. But as of now the field is full of swamps. Of grifters, of people with a solution looking for a problem. Of outright scams of questionable legality being challenged as we speak. I'll wait until the swamps work itself out before evaluating an LLM workflow.

Blockchain was always a solution looking for a problem.

LLMs are being used right now by a lot of people, myself included, to do tasks which we would have never bothered with before.

Again, if you don't know how to use them you can learn.

Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it make you 25% more productive?

Between the fraction of my time I spend actually writing code, and how much of the typing time I’m using to think anyway, I dunno how much of an increase in my overall productivity could realistically be achieved by something that just helped me type the code in faster. Probably not 25% no matter how fast it made that part. 5% is maybe possible, for something that made that part like 2-3x faster, but much more than t…

I imagine that those who cherished the written word thought similar thoughts when the printing press was invented, when the typewriter was invented, and before excel took over bookkeeping.

My productivity isn't so much enhanced. It's only 1%... 2%... 5%... globally, for each employee.

Have you ever dabbled with, mucked around in, a command line? Autocomplete functions there save millions of man-hour-typing-units per year. Something to think about.

A single employee, in a single task, for a single location may not equal much gained productivity, but companies now think on much larger scales than a single office location.

Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#536

I work for Google, and I just got done with my work day. I was just writing I guess what you'd call "AI generated code." But the code completion engine is basically just good at finishing the lines I'm writing. If I'm writing "function getAc..." it's smart enough to complete to "function getActionHandler()", and maybe suggest the correct arguments and a decent jsdoc comment. So basically, it's a helpful productivity…

This is a great anecdote. SOTA models will not provide “engineering” per se, but they will easily double productivity of a product manager that is exploring new product ideas or technologies. They are much more than intelligent auto-complete. I have done more with side projects in the last year than I did in the preceding decade.

One of my friends put it best: I just did a months worth of experimentation in two hours.

Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#537

I work for Google, and I just got done with my work day. I was just writing I guess what you'd call "AI generated code." But the code completion engine is basically just good at finishing the lines I'm writing. If I'm writing "function getAc..." it's smart enough to complete to "function getActionHandler()", and maybe suggest the correct arguments and a decent jsdoc comment. So basically, it's a helpful productivity…

So this is basically the google CEO saying "a quarter of our terminal inputs is written by a glorified tab completion"?

Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the kind you might as well copy&paste from stackoverflow This bothers me. I completely understand the conversational aspect - "what approach might work for this?", "how could we reduce the crud in this function?" - it worked a lot for me last year when I tried learning C. But the vast majority of AI use that I see is...not that. It's just glorified, very expensive search. We are willing to burn far, far more fuel t…

we've decided we can't be bothered with traditional search Traditional search (at least on the web) is dying. The entire edifice is drowning under a rapidly rising tide of spam and scam sites. No one, including Google, knows what to do about it so we're punting on the whole project and hoping AI will swoop in like deus ex machina and save the day.

Kagi has fixed traditional search for me.

Re: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI

#539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great anecdote. SOTA models will not provide “engineering” per se, but they will easily double productivity of a product manager that is exploring new product ideas or technologies. They are much more than intelligent auto-complete. I have done more with side projects in the last year than I did in the preceding decade.

One of my friends put it best: I just did a months worth of experimentation in two hours.

I find this hard to believe. Can someone give me an example of something that takes months that AI can correctly do in hours?
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