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

businessinsider.com

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

#141

Post by akira2501 »

skrebbel wrote: post #127

To my experience, AIs can generate perfectly good code relatively easy things, the kind you might as well copy&paste from stackoverflow, and they'll very confidently generate subtly wrong code for anything that's non-trivial for an experienced programmer to write. How do people deal with this? I simply don't understand the value proposition. Does Google now have 25% subtly wrong code? Or do they have 25% trivial code…

> isn't this announcement a terrible indictment

Of obviously flawed corporate structures. This CEO has no particular programming expertise and most of his companies profits do not seem to flow from this activity. I strongly doubt he has a grip on the actual facts here and is uncritically repeating what was told to him in a meeting.

He should, given his position, been the very _first_ person to ask the questions you've posed here.

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

#142

Post by paradox242 »

LinuxBender wrote: post #110
ntulpule wrote: post #88

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…

Is AI ready to crawl through all open source and find / fix all the potential security bugs or all bugs for that matter? If so will that become a commercial service or a free service? Will AI be able to detect bugs and back doors that require multiple pieces of code working together rather than being in a single piece of code? Humans have a hard time with this. - Hypothetical Example: Authentication bugs in sshd that…

Seems like there is more gain on the adversary side of this equation. Think nation-states like North Korea or China, and commercial entities like Pegasus Group.

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

#143

Post by jjtheblunt »

skrebbel wrote: post #127

To my experience, AIs can generate perfectly good code relatively easy things, the kind you might as well copy&paste from stackoverflow, and they'll very confidently generate subtly wrong code for anything that's non-trivial for an experienced programmer to write. How do people deal with this? I simply don't understand the value proposition. Does Google now have 25% subtly wrong code? Or do they have 25% trivial code…

Maybe the trick is to hide vetted correct code, of whatever origin, behind function calls for documented functions, thereby iteratively simplifying the work a later-trained LLM would need to do?

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

#144

Post by toasteros »

skrebbel wrote: post #127

To my experience, AIs can generate perfectly good code relatively easy things, the kind you might as well copy&paste from stackoverflow, and they'll very confidently generate subtly wrong code for anything that's non-trivial for an experienced programmer to write. How do people deal with this? I simply don't understand the value proposition. Does Google now have 25% subtly wrong code? Or do they have 25% trivial code…

> 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 than necessary because we've decided we can't be bothered with traditional search.

A lot of enterprise software is poorly cobbled together using stackoverflow gathered code as it is. It's part of the reason why MS Teams makes your laptop run so hot. We've decided that power-inefficient software is the best approach. Now we want to amplify that effect by burning more fuel to get the same answers, but from an LLM.

It's frustrating. It should be snowing where I am now, but it's not. Because we want to frivolously chase false convenience and burn gallons and gallons of fuel to do it. LLM usage is a part of that.

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

#145

Post by kulahan »

lysace wrote: post #121

Github Copilot had an outage for me this morning. It was kind of shocking. I now believe this metric. :-) I'll be looking into ways of running a local LLM for this purpose (code assistance in VS Code). I'm already really impressed with various quite large models running on my 32 GB Mac Studio M2 Max via Ollama. It feels like having a locally running chatgpt.

I'm very happy to hear this; maybe it's finally time to buy a ton of ram for my PC! A local, private LLM would be great. I'd try talking to it about stuff I don't feel comfortable being on OpenAI's servers.

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

#146

Post by akira2501 »

chabes wrote: post #140

When Google announced their big layoffs, I noted the timing in relation to some big AI announcements. People here told me I was crazy for suggesting that corporations could replace employees with AI this early. Now the CEO is confirming that more than a quarter of new code is created by AI. Can’t really deny that reality anymore folks.

> Can’t really deny that reality anymore folks.

You have to establish that the CEO is actually aware of the reality and is interested in accurately conveying that to you. As far as I can tell there is absolutely no reason to believe any part of this.

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

#147

Post by coldpie »

nosbo wrote: post #86

I don't write code as I'm a sysadmin. Mostly just scripts. But is this like saying intellisense writes 25% of my code? Because I use autocomplete to shortcut stuff or to create a for loop to fill with things I want to do.

Looks like it's an impressive autocomplete feature, yeah. Check out the video about halfway down here: https://research.google/blog/ai-in-software-engineering-at-g... (linked from other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41992028 )

Not what I thought when I heard "AI coding", but seems pretty neat.

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

#148

Post by frank_nitti »

sbochins wrote: post #133

It’s probably code that was previously machine generated that they’re now calling “AI Generated”.

That would make sense and be a good use case, essentially doing what OpenAPI generators do (or Yeoman generators of yore), but less deterministic I’d imagine. So optimistically I would guess it covers ground that isn’t already solved by mainstream tools.

For the example of generating an http app scaffolding from an openapi spec, it would probably account for at least 25% of the text in the generated source code. But I imagine this report would conveniently exclude the creation of the original source yaml driving the generator — I can’t imagine you’d save much typing (or mental overhead) trying to prompt a chatbot to design your api spec correctly before the codegen

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

#149

Post by fzysingularity »

hifromwork wrote: post #132
skrebbel wrote: post #127

To my experience, AIs can generate perfectly good code relatively easy things, the kind you might as well copy&paste from stackoverflow, and they'll very confidently generate subtly wrong code for anything that's non-trivial for an experienced programmer to write. How do people deal with this? I simply don't understand the value proposition. Does Google now have 25% subtly wrong code? Or do they have 25% trivial code…

25% trivial code sounds like a reasonable guess.

This seems reasonable - but I'm interpreting this as most junior-level coding needs will end and be replaced with AI.

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

#150

Post by paradox242 »

hitradostava wrote: post #95
ntulpule wrote: post #88

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…

I'm continually surprised by the amount of negativity that accompanies these sort of statements. The direction of travel is very clear - LLM based systems will be writing more and more code at all companies. I don't think this is a bad thing - if this can be accompanied by an increase in software quality, which is possible. Right now its very hit and miss and everyone has examples of LLMs producing buggy or ridiculou…

I don't see how this is sustainable. We have essentially eaten the seed corn. These current LLMs have been trained by an enormous corpus of mostly human-generated technical knowledge from sources which we already know to be currently being polluted by AI-generated slop. We also have preliminary research into how poorly these models do when training on data generated by other LLMs. Sure, it can coast off of that initial training set for maybe 5 or more years, but where will the next giant set of unpolluted training data come from? I just don't see it, unless we get something better than LLMs which is closer to AGI or an entire industry is created to explicitly create curated training data to be fed to future models.
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