More Than a Quarter of New Code At Google Is Generated By AI
- Reference: 0175355973
- News link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/24/10/29/2223255/more-than-a-quarter-of-new-code-at-google-is-generated-by-ai
- Source link:
> AI is helping Google make money as well. Alphabet reported $88.3 billion in revenue for the quarter, with Google Services (which includes Search) revenue of $76.5 billion, up 13 percent year-over-year, and Google Cloud (which includes its AI infrastructure products for other companies) revenue of $11.4 billion, up 35 percent year-over-year. Operating incomes were also strong. Google Services hit $30.9 billion, up from $23.9 billion last year, and Google Cloud hit $1.95 billion, significantly up from last year's $270 million.
"In Search, our new AI features are expanding what people can search for and how they search for it," CEO Sundar Pichai says in a statement. "In Cloud, our AI solutions are helping drive deeper product adoption with existing customers, attract new customers and win larger deals. And YouTube's total ads and subscription revenues surpassed $50 billion over the past four quarters for the first time."
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/29/24282757/google-new-code-generated-ai-q3-2024
[2] https://blog.google/inside-google/message-ceo/alphabet-earnings-q3-2024/
Generated means... what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Does this mean 25% of the codebase at Google is completely autonomous, from inception, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance?
Or does this mean Google is using their own version of Github Copilot as an autocomplete resource alongside normal engineering activities, and they're attributing 25% of the newly implemented codebase by lines, to "AI" generated activities?
Given that Google is trying to push "AI" as a sellable feature, I'd want to know the actual breakdown of how it is being dogfooded, and the ROI. Instead of talking about how much new code is "AI" generated, how many engineer hours are they saving, and are they getting equivalent or better level of deliverables (features, tests, tooling), with an equiavlent, or better delivery timeline?
[1]https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
"Pichai said using AI for coding was "boosting productivity and efficiency" within Google. After the code is generated, it is then checked and reviewed by employees, he added.
"This helps our engineers do more and move faster," said Pichai. "I'm energized by our progress and the opportunities ahead, and we continue to be laser focused on building great products.""
This basically sounds like Github Copilot. You're pairing with an LLM, but you still need humans in the loop to judge and tweak the output, do code reviews, etc. Here the benefit is that Google has large internal repositories to train against. Will external customers be able to benefit from this, or are these proprietary Google-only models?
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-earnings-q3-2024-new-code-created-by-ai-2024-10?op=1
Re: (Score:2)
Don't you just love when the LLM you're forced to work with is trying to use a string as an array index? Actual LLM coding experience.
Re: (Score:2)
It works in php, maybe that's where it got the idea from.
[1]https://www.php.net/manual/en/... [php.net]
[1] https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.array.php
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe switch to a cool language that lets you do things like that? :-D (Also, is this yet another tale from GPT-3.5 you keep repeating? Have you tried e.g. Qwen 7b-coder, etc.?
More seriously, code generation isn't the best use of LLMs in programming IME. They kick ass at code reviews, if you feel like being humbled. They are also great at helping to spitball stuff and getting pointers to authoritative sources of information.
Re: (Score:2)
See? You can't even peel LLMs away from C-style programming, let alone hard-code C programmers. I wonder if the LLM programs against buffer overflows.
Re: (Score:2)
> Does this mean 25% of the codebase at Google is completely autonomous, from inception, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance?
You could even take it to mean terraform, kubernetes manifest, helm chart, etc. "code", or anything else from that whole ecosystem of plumbing-as-code job creation software.
Re: Generated means... what? (Score:2)
Comments technically qualify as "code" for the purposes of managerial presentations. Which my "upline" didn't bother to mention during their quarterly E level meeting, when they said our code is 40% AI generated. (We use an AI system to help comment code as part of an automated documentation repository.)
Re:Generated means... what? (Score:4, Interesting)
> Does this mean 25% of the codebase at Google is completely autonomous, from inception, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance?
In [1]the investor announcement [blog.google], it's a somewhat disjointed statement at the end of a long line of more concrete statements. You can imagine that it was put there by some ambitious ladder-climbing manager, who did some "research" motivated to make a phrase into the earnings announcement. Having made a phrase into the earnings announcement, his profile is now raised compared to his fellow comrades (or so he thinks, while those around him roll their eyes. But it also might actually work in helping him get promoted).
Incidentally, the earnings report also mentioned [2]Notebook LM [notebooklm.google], which uses AI to summarizes long texts. So now we're going to have people generating long texts from simple prompts, and then we're going to use AI to simplify it back into the simple prompts. This is how we will communicate in the future. It's glorious!
[1] https://blog.google/inside-google/message-ceo/alphabet-earnings-q3-2024/#full-stack-approach
[2] https://notebooklm.google/
Re: (Score:2)
> Does this mean 25% of the codebase at Google is completely autonomous, from inception, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance?
Sounds like it. Or maybe it is only experimental code, i.e. the number is very misleading? Basically a lie?
Re: Generated means... what? (Score:2)
It means the internal IDE has a pretty good auto-complete.
Generating Code isn't Something to Brag About... (Score:2)
There's a reason senior software engineers share their commit summaries when more lines of code are deleted than are added. As I've gone through my career, now a Principal Engineer, I spend less and less time in the editor. I joke with my boss (and his boss) that the best bang for their buck is when I'm asleep, or in the shower. That's where I come up with solutions to the capital-H HARD problems.
Re: Generating Code isn't Something to Brag About. (Score:2)
I stare at code for hours and can't figure out why the test is failing. I go vacuum the living room, suddenly it comes to me. It's really weird.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe you should clean the house a little more often? Just joking, that happens to me too.
Re: Generated means... what? (Score:2)
A while ago I had chatgpt take a list of keyboard codes and build them into a few rust structures. Saved me about 2 hours worth of time, and makes up over half of the "code" of that project. Problem is it's not exactly code, it's basically just rote transcription of data from one format to another. No flow control logic, just data. In other words, grunt work, not fun.
I also asked it to write the code for actually searching for the right USB device to send those codes to and...wow, it did it in the hardest,
Black-hat hackers be like... (Score:2)
[1]Current photo of every cybercriminal and state-backed cyberwarfare organization upon hearing this news [kym-cdn.com]
[1] https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/030/423/cover5.jpg
Best-case scenario (Score:3)
The best-case scenario here is that Google counted every single character that came out when a coder hit the autocomplete key to enter the next couple words of their code (probably variable and function names mostly, like many code-oriented text editors have done for decades), and they're selling it to investors to make it look like they're 1/4 way to kicking all their coders to the curb and becoming a fully-automated post-human-labor company.
Wouldn't be the first time something like that happened, the health care megacorp I used to work for once put out a press release where they said they were using AI for processes which I can assure you were 100% AI-free at the time (like the rest of the entire software suite it was part of) and I would bet still is. I pointed it out in our company chat and joked about whether we should be fitting our servers with GPUs or NPUs and got lots of laughs.
Re: (Score:2)
Any company with a datascience team (if they also needed to impress people) suddenly turned their data science team into AI when talking about it publicly.
Why not? Even A* is AI.
All the coders (Score:1)
Who made fun of the writer’s strike, your day is coming. AI doesn’t have to be perfect, just good enough. Don’t think the suits aren’t paying attention. Your replacement is already planned.
Re: All the coders (Score:1)
It will eventually replace the suits too.
Re: (Score:2)
They will undoubtedly be capable of replacing the suits first. The question is whether the suits would allow themselves to be replaced. They haven't let any small shellscripts replace them so far :-P
Re: All the coders (Score:2)
The SWE job is about more than code. A lot more.
20 y ago /. predicted all devs would be in India (Score:2)
> Who made fun of the writer’s strike, your day is coming. AI doesn’t have to be perfect, just good enough. Don’t think the suits aren’t paying attention. Your replacement is already planned.
Been there, done that. 20 years ago, /. was making bold proclamations that no one would ever write code in the USA again. Offshore outsourcing was a huge fad and it failed...we're going to go through this again. There will be AI generated code...which will be "good enough" until it isn't and people get sick of bloated code that's easy to break into and impossible to maintain.
Remember...it's pretty easy to "write code". Every developer has written some script or tool to "write code." Maintaining it..
Counter marketing or enshitification? (Score:2)
It's very possible that Google managers really believe these numbers - the engineers almost certainly know better.
I wonder whether they are just marketing to competitors. If they can get their competitors to double down on bug seeding AI generated code (42% more bugs, by some estimates), then they get to continue their enshitification campaign unchallenged by anyone else. Or maybe, we have an explanation for their current state as almost completely enshitified...
Breaking news: (Score:1)
More than 75% of code for production lines, is reused from the last production line.
News at 11:00
They're gonna shit the bed SO hard. (Score:2)
It's going to be hilarious.
So? (Score:2)
If we're going by lines of code, I'd say about a quarter of the code at my job is generated by IDE plugins. Maybe more.
Re: (Score:2)
I find that if I write up some good comments about what I'm wanting to do beforehand, the coding assistant will autocomplete most of it as I go. I can just hit the tab key for the routine stuff.
Re: Engineers, brace yourself for the IT meltdown (Score:2)
The whole "hardware is cheaper than developers" phenomenon has been in full swing now for decades.
Witness web sites. A basic 4 page static site now needs 2gb of WordPress bullshit and sends 150mb of shit to the browser.
All for a few hundred words of text and a handful of images.
Somewhere along the line we took a wrong turn.
Re: (Score:2)
I dont care, businesses pay for it in exploits, downtime for updates, continuous bills on resource usage. Enjoy.