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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

#191

Post by taeric »

gerash wrote: post #177
Twirrim wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We work very closely with Google DeepMind to adapt Gemini models for Google-scale coding and other Software Engineering usecases. Considering how terrible and frequently broken the code that the public facing Gemini produces, I'll have to be honest that that kind of scares me. Gemini frequently fails at some fairly basic stuff, even in popular languages where it would have had a lot of source material to work from;…

I believe most people use AI to help them quickly figure out how to use a library or an API without having to read all their (often out dated) documentation instead of helping them solve some mathematical challenge

If the documentation is out of date, such that it doesn't help, this doesn't bode well for the training data of the AI helping it get it right, either?

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

#192

Post by ithkuil »

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…

Or perhaps that even for excellent engineers and complicated problems a quarter of the code one writes is stupid almost copy-pasteable boilerplate which is now an excellent target for the magic lArge text Interpolator

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

#193

Post by wvenable »

8note wrote: post #73
ausbah wrote: post #3

i would be may more impressed if LLMs could do code compression. more code == more things that can break, and when llms can generate boatloads of it with a click you can imagine what might happen

How would it know which edge cases are being useful and which ones aren't? I understand more code as being more edge cases

More code could just be useless code that no longer serves any purpose but still looks reasonable to the naked eye. An LLM can certainly figure out and suggest maybe some conditional is impossible given the rest of the code.

I can also suggest alternatives, like using existing library functions for things that might have been coded manually.

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

#194

Post by AnimalMuppet »

chongli wrote: post #169
toasteros wrote: post #144

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.

But it can't save the day.

The problem with Google search is that it indexes all the web, and there's (as you say) a rising tide of scam and spam sites.

The problem with AI is that it scoops up all the web as training data, and there's a rising tide of scam and spam sites.

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

#195

Post by wvenable »

marcosdumay wrote: post #26
dmix wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The elitism of programmers who think the boilerplate code they write for 25% of the job, that's already been written before by 1000 other people before, is in fact a valuable use of company time to write by hand again. IMO it's only really an issue if a competent human wasn't involved in the process, basically a person who could have written it if needed, then they do the work connecting it to the useful stuff, and h…

If 25% of your code is boilerplate, you have a serious architectural problem. That said, I've seen even higher ratios. But never in any place that survived for long.

25% of new code might be boilerplate. All my apps in my organization start out roughly the same way with all the same stuff. You could argue on day one that 100% of the code is boilerplate and by the end of the project it is only a small percentage.

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

#196

Post by lokar »

chongli wrote: post #169
toasteros wrote: post #144

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.

It took the scam/spam sites a few years to catch up to Google search. Just wait a bit, equilibrium will return.

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

#198

Post by _spduchamp »

I can ask AI to generate the same code multiple times, and get new variations on programming style each time, and get the occasional solution that is just not quite right but sort of works. Sounds like a recipe for a gloppy mushy mess of style salad.

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

#199

Post by [deleted] »

skissane wrote: post #180
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…

> 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? Well, just in the last 24 hours, ChatGPT gave me solutions to some relatively complex problems that turned out to be signif…

[deleted]

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

#200

Post by AnimalMuppet »

senko wrote: post #167
Twirrim wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We work very closely with Google DeepMind to adapt Gemini models for Google-scale coding and other Software Engineering usecases. Considering how terrible and frequently broken the code that the public facing Gemini produces, I'll have to be honest that that kind of scares me. Gemini frequently fails at some fairly basic stuff, even in popular languages where it would have had a lot of source material to work from;…

We collectively deride leetcoding interviews yet ask AI to flawlessly solve leetcode questions. I bet I'd make more errors on my first try at it.

Writing a prime-number factorization function is hardly "leetcode".
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