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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

#891

Post by arisAlexis »

simplyluke wrote: post #840
arisAlexis wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you are using it like that doesn't mean that it can't be used for the whole stack and on its own and the public including laymen such as the Nvidia CEO and Sam think that yes, we (I'm a dev) will be replaced. Plan accordingly my friend.

I was a hacker before the entire stack I work in was common or released, and I’ll be one when all our tools change again in the future. I have family who programmed with punch cards. But I doubt the predictions from men whose net worth depends on the hype they foment.

It's not tools. It's intelligent agents capable of human output.

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

#892

Post by xen0 »

I really do wonder who these engineers are, that the current 'AI' tools are able to write so much of their code.

Maybe my situation is unusual; I haven't written all that much code at Google lately, but what I do write is pretty tied to specific details of the program and the AI auto completion is just not that useful. Sometimes it auto completes a method signature correctly, but it never gets the body right (or even particularly close).

And it routinely making up methods or fields on objects I want to use is anti productive.

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

#893

Post by petre »

rty32 wrote: post #787
ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no one is stating "we've replaced X% of our workforce with AI" Even if that's been happening, I don't think it would be politically savvy to admit it. In today's social climate claiming to replace humans with AI would attract the wrong kind of attention from politicians (during an election year) and from the public in general. This would be even more unwise to admit for a company like Google who's an "AI producer".…

> I don't think it would be politically savvy to admit it. Depends on who you ask. If Trump wins and Elon Musk actually gets a new job, they would be bragging about replacing humans with AI all day long. And corporates are going to love it. Not sure about what voters think though. But the fact that most of these companies are in California, New York etc means that it barely matters.

Yup, just like full self driving and ending the war in Ukraine on 24 hours.

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

#894

Post by toasteros »

GaggiX wrote: post #418
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…

These models are simply much more powerful than a tradition search engine and stackoverflow, so many people use these models for a reason, a friend of mine that never tried ChatGPT until very recently managed to solve a problem he couldn't find a solution on stackoverflow using GPT-4o, next time he's probably going to ask the model directly.

I don't know what your friend's prompts were, but this probably speaks to the conversational aspect. I've found success in using LLMs to "search" for things I don't know how to search for - a 'tip of my tongue' type scenario.

"How do I do a for loop" though is a waste of time and energy and should be put into a search engine. There is no need to use the inefficient power needs of an LLM to answer that question. The search engine will have cached the results of that question, leading to a much faster discovery of the answer, and less power draw to do it, whereas an LLM needs to ponder your question EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. A huge waste.

Stop using LLMs for simple things.

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

#895

Post by burningChrome »

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #705
NotAnOtter wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also work at google (until last Friday). Agree with what you said. My thoughts are 1. This quote is clearly meant to exaggerate reality, and they are likely including things like fully automated CL/PR's which have been around for a decade as "AI generated". 2. I stated before that if a team of 10 is equally as productive as a team of 8 utilizing things like copilot, it's fair to say "AI replaced 2 engineers", in my…

> no one is stating "we've replaced X% of our workforce with AI" Even if that's been happening, I don't think it would be politically savvy to admit it. In today's social climate claiming to replace humans with AI would attract the wrong kind of attention from politicians (during an election year) and from the public in general. This would be even more unwise to admit for a company like Google who's an "AI producer".…

>> Even if that's been happening, I don't think it would be politically savvy to admit it.

When I was working in RPA (robotic process automation) about 7 years ago, we were explicitly told not to say "You can reduce your team size by having use develop an automation that handles what they're doing!"

Even back then we were told to talk about how RPA (and by proxy AI) empowers your team to focus on the really important things. Automation just reduces the friction to getting things done. Instead of doing 4 hours of mindless data input or moving folders from one place to the other, automation gives you back those four hours so your team can do something sufficiently more important and focus on the bigger picture stuff.

Some teams loved the idea. Other leaders were skeptical and never adopted it. I spent the majority of those three years trying to selling them on this idea automation was good and very little time actually coding. Its interesting seeing the paradigm shift and seeing this stuff everywhere now.

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

#896

Post by mithametacs »

JohnFen wrote: post #818
randomdata wrote: post #778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like he says, the "comment" describes what he wants to do . That's not what humans are interested in. The human already knows "what he wants to do" when they read the code. It's the things like "why did he want to do this in the first place?" that is lacking in the code, and what information is available to add in a comment for the sake of humans. Remember, LLMs are just compilers for programming languages that just…

> Like he says, the "comment" describes what he wants to do. That's not what humans are interested in. When I'm maintaining other people's code, or my own after enough time has gone by, I'm very interested in that sort of comment. It gives me a chance to see if the code as written does what the comment says it was intended to do. It's not valuable for most of the code in a project, but is incredibly valuable for cert…

Or for something that needs like a quick mathematical lemma or a worked example. A comment on what is fantastic.

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

#897

Post by mithametacs »

_heimdall wrote: post #767
Aachen wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried making a meme some months ago with exactly this idea, but for emails. One person would tell an LLM "answer that I'm fine with either option" and sends a 5 KB email, in response to which the recipient receives it and gets the automatic summary function to tell them (in a good case) "they're happy either way" or (in a bad case) "they don't give a damn". It didn't really work, too complex for meme format as far…

If someone is going to use an LLM to send me an email, I'd much rather them just send me the prompt directly. For the LLM message to be useful the prompt would have included all the context and details anyway, I don't need an LLM to make it longer and sound more "professional" or polite.

Not necessarily. Your prompt could include instructions to gather information from your emails and address book to tell your friend about all the relevant contacts you know in the shoe industry.

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

#898

Post by theptip »

hyperpape wrote: post #681
onion2k wrote: post #670

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.

The goal of these cost cutting initiatives is not an absolute reduction in cost, but a relative one. They needed to show an improvement in operating margin, ie % of revenue spent on engineers.

If your engineers become 20% more efficient then your margins are better and your problem is solved. (Indeed if you have tech that can make any engineer 20% more efficient then you are back in the game of hiring as many as you can find, as long as each added engineer brings in enough additional revenue.)

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