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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

#691
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humans are machines Even if we accept the premise (seeing humans as machines is literally dehumanising and a favourite argument of those who exploit them), not all machines are created equal. Would you use a bicycle to fill your taxes? > Somehow, we got to the moon Quite hand wavey. We didn’t get to the Moon by reading a bunch of text from the era then probabilistically joining word fragments, passing that around t…

LLMs are a lot better at a lot of things than a lot of humans. We got to the moon using a large number of systems to a) avoid errors where possible and b) build in redundancies. Even an LLM knows this and knew what the statement meant: https://chatgpt.com/share/6722e04f-0230-8002-8345-5d2eba2e7d... Putting "corrected" in quotes and saying "death spiral" implies error compounding. https://chatgpt.com/share/6722e19c-7f…

Ah, well then, if the LLM said so then it’s surely right. Because as we all know, LLMs are never ever wrong and they can read minds over the internet. If it says something about a human, then surely you can trust it.

You’ve just proven my point. My issue with LLMs is precisely people turning off their brains and blindly taking them at face value, even arduously defending the answers in the face of contrary evidence.

If you’re basing your arguments on those answers then we don’t need to have this conversation. I have access to LLMs like everyone else, I don’t need to come to HN to speak with a robot.

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

#692

While I get the MBA-speak of lines-of-code that AI is now able to accomplish, it does make me think about their highly-curated internal codebase that makes them well placed to potentially get to 50% AI-generated code. One common misconception is that all LLMs are the same. The models are trained the same, but trained on wildly different datasets. Google, and more specifically the Google codebase is arguably one of th…

> Google codebase is arguably one of the most curated, and iterated on datasets in existence

I spent 12 years of my career in the Google codebase.

This assertion is technically correct in that google3 has been around for 20 years, and all code gets reviewed, but the implication that Google's codebase is a high-quality training set is not consistent with my experience.

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

#693
post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> context length is too short to be really helpful for working on existing codebase. This is kind of true, my approach is I spend a fairly large amount of time copy-pasting code from relevant modules back and forth into ChatGPT so it has enough context to make the correct changes. Most changes I need to make don't need more than 2-3 modules though. > the output code is pretty much always broken in some way, and you n…

> I'd say maybe 60-70% of the code it writes I don't have to touch at all. ...yet. Bugs can take time to surface.

And this is equally true whether the code was entirely written by a human or not.

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

#694
post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Most AI hype is this bad. They have to justify the valuations.

"tab completion good enough to write 25% of code" feels like a pretty good hit rate to me! Especially when you consider that a good chink of the other 75% is going to be the complex, detailed stuff where you probably want someone thinking about it fairly carefully.

25% is a great win if you are prone to RSI. And for quicker feedback. But in terms of the overarching programming goal? Churning out code is a small part of it.

Code is often a liability.

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

#695

I cannot imagine this to be true, cause imo current LLM's coding abilities are very limited. It definitely makes me more productive to use it as a tool, but I use it mainly for boilerplate and short examples (where I had to read some library documentation before). Whenever the problem requires thinking, it horribly fails because it cannot reason (yet). So unless this is also true for google devs, I cannot see that 25…

My guess is that they counted each line of code made by an engineer using AI coding tools. Besides, even google employees write a lot of boilerplate, especially android IIRC, not to mention simple but essential code, so AI can prevent carpal tunnel for the junior devs working on that.

> My guess is that they counted each line of code made by an engineer using AI coding tools.

... and forgot to count the Delete presses.

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

#697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because you are using it like that doesn't mean that it can't be used for the whole stack Well no, but we have no evidence it can be used for the whole stack, whatever that means.

Even last year's gpt4 could make a whole iphone app from scratch for someone that doesn't know how to code. You can find videos online. I think you are applying the ostrich method which is understandable. We need to adapt.

> I think you are applying the ostrich method which is understandable

Asking for evidence is not being an ostrich.

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

#698

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…

"Our overhyped Autocomplete Implementation (A.I.) is completing 25% of our lines of code so well that we need to fund nuclear reactors to power the server farms."

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

#699
post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm working on a CRM with a flexible data model, and ChatGPT has written most of the code. I don't use the IDE integrations because I find them too "low level" - I work with GPT more in a sort of "pair programming" session: I give it high level, focused tasks with bits of low level detail if necessary; I paste code back and forth; and I let it develop new features or do refactorings. This workflow is not perfect but…

I share your sentiment, I've written three apps where I've used language models extensively (a different one for each: ChatGPT, Mixtral and Llama-70B) and while I agree that they where immensely helpful in terms of velocity, there are a bunch of caveats: - it only works well when you write code from scratch, context length is too short to be really helpful for working on existing codebase. - the output code is pretty…

> Also, I didn't really noticed a significant difference in code quality, even the best model (GPT-4) write code that doesn't work,

Interesting, personally I have noticed a difference. Mostly in how well the models pick up small details and context. Although I do have to agree that the open Llama models are generally fairly serviceable.

Recently I have tended to lean towards Claude Sonnet 3.5 as it seems slightly better. Although that does differ per language as well.

As far as them being slow, I haven't really noticed a difference. I use them mostly through the API with open webui and the answers come quick enough.

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

#700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no one is stating "we've replaced X% of our workforce with AI" That's only worth doing if you're trying to cut costs though. If the company has unmet ambitions there's no reason to shrink the headcount from 10 to 8 and have the same amount of output when you can keep 10 people and have the output of 12 by leveraging AI.

Almost all the big tech companies have had layoffs over the past several years. I think it’s safe to say cost cutting is very much part of their goal.

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