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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

#151

Post by akira2501 »

marstall wrote: post #126

maps with recent headlines about AI improving programmer productivity 20-30%. which puts it in line with previous code-generation technologies i would imagine. I wonder which of these increased productivity the most? - Assembly Language - early Compilers - databases - graphics frameworks - ui frameworks (windows) - web apps - code generators (rails scaffolding) - genAI

Early Compilers. By a wide margin. They are the enabling factor for everything that comes below it. It's what allows you to share library interfaces and actually use them in a consistent manor and across multiple architectures. It entirely changed the shape of software development.

The gap between "high level assembly" and "compiled language" is about as large as it gets.

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

#152

Post by akira2501 »

mjbale116 wrote: post #53

If you manage to convince software engineers that you are doing them a favour by employing them then they will approach any workplace negotiations with a specific mindset which will make them grab the first number it gets thrown to them. These statements are brilliant.

These statements rely on an unchallenged monopoly position. This is not sustainable. These statements will hasten the collapse.

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

#153

Post by nwellinghoff »

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…

They probably have ai that scans existing human written code and auto generates patches and fixes to improve performance or security. The 25% is just a top level stat with no real meaning without context.

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

#156

Post by paradox242 »

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.

When leaders without the requisite technical knowledge are making decisions then the question of whether AI is capable of replacing human workers is orthogonal to the question of whether human workers will be replaced by AI.

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

#157

Post by hbn »

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.

I'd suggest the bigger factor in those layoffs is the money was made in earlier covid years where money was flowing and everyone was overhiring to show off record growth, then none of those employees had any justification for being kept around and were just a money sink so they fired them all.

Not to mention Elon publicly demonstrated losing 80% of staff when he took over twitter and - you can complain about his management all you want - as someone who's been using it the whole way through, from a technical POV their downtimes and software quality has not been any worse and they're shipping features faster. A lot of software companies are overstaffed, especially Google who has spent years paying people to make projects just to get a PO promoted, then letting the projects rot and die to be replaced by something else. That's a lot of useless work being done.

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

#158

Post by _DeadFred_ »

paradox242 wrote: post #150
hitradostava wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 initi…

These tools also require the developer class to that they are intended to replace to continue to do what they currently do (create the knowledge source to train the AI on). It's not like the AIs are going to be creating the accessible knowledge bases to train AIs on, especially for new language extensions/libraries/etc. This is a one and f'd development. It will give a one time gain and then companies will be shocked when it falls apart and there's no developers trained up (because they all had to switch careers) to replace them. Unless Google's expectation is that all languages/development/libraries will just be static going forward.

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

#159

Post by tdeck »

rcarmo wrote: post #96

There is a running gag among my friends using Google Chat (or whatever their corporate IM tool is now called) that this explains a lot of what they’re experiencing while using it…

I didn't know anyone outside Google actually used that...

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

#160

Post by brainwad »

paradox242 wrote: post #150
hitradostava wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 initi…

The LLM codegen at Google isn't unsupervised. It's integrated into the IDE as both autocomplete and prompt-based assistant, so you get a lot of feedback from a) what suggestions the human accepts and b) how they fix the suggestion when it's not perfect. So future iterations of the model won't be trained on LLM output, but on a mixture of human written code and human-corrected LLM output.

As a dev, I like it. It speeds up writing easy but tedious code. It's just a bit smarter version of the refactoring tools already common in IDEs...

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