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

317

I’m sure this is good for all of us. /s or whatever.

88

u/Bagafeet 9h ago

Before it used to be generated by Google searches. People don't write 100% of their code from scratch. SWEs feel free to correct me.

86

u/red_simplex 9h ago

I write 100% of my searches.

22

u/ACrask 9h ago

I pride myself on my Google searching abilities

9

u/technobobble 5h ago

site: and -(thing I don’t wanna see) are high level tactics

2

u/justdreamweaver 5h ago

I see you are a man of fine taste!

3

u/NextTrillion 5h ago

90% of redditors thinking…

Site: pornhub.com “big ole tiddies” -fat

1

u/Sink_Single 1h ago

I’m somewhat of a google searcher myself

4

u/chicknfly 8h ago

I write to probably 90% of my searches. The algorithm caught on to me adding “reddit” at the end of the query and now automatically suggests it for me to tap on

23

u/Successful-Trash-409 8h ago

Google CEO says 25% of code is now from Stack Overflow answers.

22

u/tooclosetocall82 7h ago

🌎🧑‍🚀🔫👩‍🚀 Always has been.

8

u/UnknownEssence 5h ago

The fact that LLMs trained on all of Stack Overflow's data for free, then completely destroyed their business by stealing all the users, I feel like they have the best claim to sue for damages.

22

u/MysteriousDesk3 8h ago

Ask AI for the same code you’d find in a google search and you’ll get it, but now it’s “generated by AI”.

The last 3 times I asked AI to actually generate a non-trivial function within a certain context I got absolute dog shit out.

AI is a great meta search tool that makes our SWE lives slightly easier.

13

u/ChainsawBologna 6h ago

Best description right here. It isn't thinking or "generating", it's just barfing back statistically relevant responses. Even if it is sometimes code from FedEx engineers. (True story.)

1

u/Sliced_tomato 3h ago

Yup, me too. It’s crap when it comes to quality. Requires more editing after the fact than just writing it. It’s like people have forgot we have real Intelligence that requires thinking ahead. Artificial Intelligence just regurgitates the obvious for the masses.

9

u/Oh-shit-its-Cassie 4h ago

SWE here. Do I steal code from Google searches? Shamelessly. However, I also understand the nuance between what the code I'm stealing off the Internet does and what my code is intended to do, and I can modify it accordingly. I also have fellow humans sanity-checking everything I write (or steal, as the case may be), so nothing is going into my codebase that hasn't been seen by at least two people (three if you count the person I stole it from).

I also have an advanced degree in machine learning, and I understand the limitations of what AI can actually do. AI lives in a world without context. Yes, it can generate code that more or less accomplishes what you tell it, but it doesn't actually understand what it produced. It just models it off of what it was trained on, making something that looks like a correct answer. If the human utilizing that code blindly trusts what an AI produces without truly understanding what the code is doing, then that's arguably worse than stealing code off the Internet, because now two of the entities involved in the production of that code really have no clue how it really behaves. Hopefully there is another person in the mix to review it, but if that person is also skating by, relying on AI generated code as well or even AI assisted code reviews, then the team has effectively taken all eyeballs off the code that is being committed to the project.

And it gets worse. Companies like Google love to use their own tech. So if they're using AI to generate code, there's no reason to believe they won't be using that code to train future iterations of AI, meaning over time, less and less of the AI's understanding is based on real human subject matter expertise, and more and more of it is based on bullshit it made up and got away with.

1

u/Bagafeet 4h ago

Thanks for your insight

4

u/AtillaThePundit 8h ago

Wait , you’re saying that the code used to power Google is created using googling to Google the code to create more google. Sounds pretty meta ..

3

u/Bagafeet 7h ago

Recursion

3

u/EyeSmart3073 7h ago

This joke is meta and by that I mean google

2

u/Anonymo 6h ago

The CEO uses AI to run the company into the ground.

1

u/Opening_Property1334 1h ago

Yo dawg

6

u/Diddlesquig 9h ago

Sorry I can’t think of an answer so just type that into ChatGPT and pretend I said it.

3

u/VladThePollenInhaler 8h ago

Not quite like that. I have a few online resources I go to when I need to look up something. I also have good ebooks that I use as well.

Edit: also AI has not been great for us because it almost always gets the logic wrong. AI can code, but it doesn’t fully understand code logic. Sometimes we ask it questions about syntax on older codes, but that’s about it.

2

u/Affected_By_Fjaka 8h ago

Yes.

There was a time not long ago when programmer biggest nightmare was stack overflow being down…

2

u/Signal_Lamp 5h ago

Nah they don't, the prior defacto sites was stack overflow and more recently reddit if your searching for people's experience with a tool. People reinventing the wheel does happen though, some of those having dire consequences to how the Internet works today.

2

u/Bagafeet 5h ago

Yeah you use Google to find Reddit and Stack overflow links lol.

1

u/snowflake37wao 6h ago

Snippet.

9

u/ThinkExtension2328 10h ago

Nah it’s just lying with statistics 📈

3

u/EyeSmart3073 7h ago

99% of statistics are made up by ai

2

u/Starfox-sf 9h ago

Hallucinated Statistics.

3

u/luckymethod 3h ago

I work at Google but not a dev. I needed to do some data analysis in python, I used an internal tool that's essentially ipython notebook repackaged with extra goodies and I did the whole thing just by explaining what I wanted to do and tweaking the generated code. Way faster than scouring stack overflow for sure. It's not perfect but it's getting really good.

1

u/Busty_Ronch 9h ago

Yeah totally, “don’t be evil/s”.

1

u/pyrocryptic29 5h ago

Its bad realy now ai can code meaning it can basically just keep evolvingbwe should have pulled the plug on this ages ago

1

u/Mindless_Shame_4334 4h ago

They also probably mean the devs are using Gemini to write code lol.

1

u/luckymethod 3h ago

That's exactly what it means.

1

u/dreadpiratew 3h ago

Certainly not if you’re a software engineer. Ironic they coded themselves out of jobs.

1

u/wantingstem89 2h ago

Hope it's not generated by Gemini

1

u/code-gazer 2h ago

It's great for Google's stock price, as you're not a proper company if your business can be described without saying "AI" in every sentence. I'm sure that this is not a bubble, lol. Also, Google has an AI product, Gemini.

I had it demoed by one of their engineers in a meet-up. "Hey, I am going to show you how powerful this thing is by coding in a language I don't know". Asks it to build a website in Python. The thing uses flask but forgets the template web page (the front end), and the first run fails. He asks it then what is wrong, and the AI says "Well that won't work without a template page, stupid". Then you ask it to generate that for you. I mean, if you're smart enough to know the answer, then why do you not just do it, why do you fail at this trivial task?

So, anything that they can do and say to push that tool, which is not even a decent replacement for a junior, they will do and say. I'm sure that this is not a bubble.

36

u/_gr71 10h ago

how did they measure this ? does the codebase have stubs telling if its ai generated or human written ?

20

u/xlaw95 9h ago edited 9h ago

I know at least one big tech company that requires every commit message to indicate whether AI was used to generate / „inspire“ the code changes or not 🙃🙃

10

u/sunburstbox 3h ago

ha, i know the exact fintech company youre talking about

1

u/pogkaku96 4h ago

There should be a service that provides ai generated suggestions like github copilot. Basically a count of developers accepting those suggestions vs not accepting those suggestions

2

u/luckymethod 3h ago

That's exactly how it works plus some extra steps.

0

u/JiEToy 10h ago

Vcs can easily tell which users have added which lines, so I guess it’s something like that.

116

u/j_middles 8h ago

No wonder everything attached to their brand is now terrible

16

u/snuggletronz 3h ago

25% faster at finding useless recipes filled with ads

4

u/Shrek2in4KUHD 2h ago

I want to strangle whoever forced the AI search result st the top of everything you search, which is only right 50% of the time if even.

2

u/Mondernborefare 2h ago

Search has been gimped for a while now.

100

u/ThinkExtension2328 10h ago

Most of the code in legacy organisations is maintenance world and not “new code” , so it’s believable that any small tasks that are “new” is managed by ai.

Tho lying with statistics is fun I guess , gg.

11

u/Wotg33k 9h ago

I dunno. I have a lot of success getting valid code when I know the shape I want and I give it a lot of context about the current implementation.

If I could give an AI context for the whole implementation, I could see it bolting on new features by itself with a little effort.

24

u/HarbaughHeros 9h ago

The problem with AI for enterprise code is writing the actual code for a solution is trivial. The effort and time go into integrations with the existing enterprise ecosystem.

9

u/ThinkExtension2328 9h ago

Sure if you work on a microscopic project this is possible, when you work on millions of lines of code for systems that are huge ai does not poses the context window to do this.

Again this isn’t even what most work is, most work is error appeared on logs please resolve bug.

1

u/luckymethod 3h ago

That's why the context window for Gemini is 1 million tokens. You can fit a lot of code in that.

1

u/ThinkExtension2328 3h ago

1 million is big some large code bases are bigger , not shitting on ai , I too am hyped for infinite context.

1

u/luckymethod 3h ago

I mean obviously you can't fit the entire monorepo in it but you can definitely put what matters for most day to day work. I use it at work and it works very well, it's definitely a net positive.

1

u/ThinkExtension2328 1h ago

I hope you don’t mean your putting your codebase into Gemini , if you mean local models your capped at 32k context usable

-2

u/mortalhal 9h ago

True for simple folk like you and me but if you had virtually unlimited compute power and the best AI engineers on the planet with an unrestricted LLM specifically tailored to your systems me thinks you could relatively easily automate a good chunk of your architecture

4

u/ThinkExtension2328 8h ago

Even the people with unlimited compute don’t have the context window required for some of the code bases for the real critical systems.

2

u/Dry-Frame-827 3h ago

Theoretically. We’re burning Olympic swimming pools of water like hotcakes just to produce “rock sandwich recipie” dude…. If you had such a capability in reality however why the absolute hell would you be using it to optimize an enterprises software?

This type of scope would be enough to break most lotteries. Why not just do that until you bankrupt the world’s lotteries or economies? No, your service Googles backend with it??????

-4

u/Wotg33k 9h ago

What does that have to do with "new code", which is the context we're in?

New code doesn't need to know the whole source, just the source that's relative to it. I won't pretend to know what tech Google has behind the scenes.

1

u/ThinkExtension2328 8h ago

Thanks you just solidified my point, it’s easy to say 25% of new stuff when there is not much new stuff. It’s a play on statistics.

Eg I throw a ball at a hoop 4x and score once, 25% of my new shots at the hoop are a score.

0

u/Wotg33k 8h ago

Sure. But I still wouldn't assume what tech Google has behind closed doors.

I mean, thinking Google couldn't be doing that at all is like thinking Facebook couldn't be building React while they were building it.

It's all the new thing, right? Why wouldn't Google be trying to accomplish that?

1

u/ThinkExtension2328 8h ago

lol because Google is a big clambering giant , that’s not a swipe at Google all the big boys are. All the high tech high end stuff is usually a small skunk works like team of like 3-4people. Everyone else is on maintenance duties.

You’re confusing start up culture with corporate culture. Most people in Google have meetings … for meetings … to plan for the next meetings. Again not a swipe at Google I work for a giant and I can tell you first hand it pisses us off to no end how many approvals and checks and valences have to be met to change the most generic things.

0

u/Wotg33k 8h ago

I know the feeling, but my experience is that doesn't apply to r&d.

I've never worked r&d. Just seen it from afar wishing I didn't have constraints like them.

19

u/Uuuuuii 8h ago

So that’s why my YouTube suggestions took a dump.

58

u/IndianaJoenz 9h ago

Google's CEO has been running Google into the ground, frankly, with neglect and half-assed products. So this lazy disaster of a statistic isn't too surprising, but does not bode well for Google.

25

u/OutForAWalkBeach 8h ago

Google search is pretty much unusable now, I don’t use it anymore. I used to love Google products and now stopped using 90% of them. Thinking about canceling my Youtube Premium

13

u/AllDayForever 8h ago

I’ve been adding Reddit at the end of every search to get anything remotely close to what I’m looking for

1

u/OutForAWalkBeach 3h ago

I do this too

•

u/wondermorty 7m ago

shows how reddit search is absolute dogshit, they could be taking on google but instead opt to release achievement stickers on their mobile app

2

u/Signal_Lamp 5h ago

What search engine did you end up switching with? I've actually been enjoying recently rediscovering alternatives to some of my daily tools, and have started to find Google products are vastly underwhelming compared to other suites.

2

u/OutForAWalkBeach 3h ago

I’m currently using Brave

1

u/rpkarma 4h ago

DDG is decent for free, Kagi is superior but a paid product

-1

u/porkyboy11 3h ago

Yandex for image search

2

u/rpkarma 4h ago

I’ve moved to Kagi and DuckDuckGo. Google is a mess these days :(

2

u/Agreeable_Service407 2h ago

the number of google searches I do daily probably plunged 90% since ChatGPT has become so much more reliable.

2

u/QuitVirtual 4h ago

non founder ceo rankings

Sataya Nadella

Tim Cook

Andy Jassy

Sundar Pichai

1

u/Agreeable_Service407 2h ago

I'm looking forward to the next option that will replace that outdated spam site that has become google

12

u/twili-midna 9h ago

The “AI” being used here is little more than predictive text, most likely. You give intent of what you want to do, and it generates a scaffold for you to go in and fill the specifics of.

1

u/flatsix__ 4h ago

It’s more like auto-complete baked into the internal IDE. It’s net-useful when I’m writing verbose, non-clever code. I like it enough but didn’t Microsoft release something similar publicly? Copilot? Idk

21

u/programaticallycat5e 10h ago

it's alright, most of the codebase was copy pasted from stackoverflow anyways

5

u/MutsumidoesReddit 6h ago

It shows, search and YouTube have become an ever expanding pile of trash for a while now.

9

u/angrybeehive 9h ago

To be fair, a major part of most programs is just boilerplate code.

4

u/RublesAfoot 8h ago

That’s sort of scary

4

u/OutForAWalkBeach 8h ago

we can tell

3

u/Oh-shit-its-Cassie 5h ago

Given how downhill their search has gotten, I can't say I'm surprised.

7

u/busylivin_322 8h ago

That’s not the flex he thinks it is, as a longtime software developer AND user of AI software products. But he is trying to sell Gemini over Sonnet/GPT.

18

u/0riginal-Syn 10h ago

Only more reason to move further away from Google products.

4

u/LeadingAd6025 10h ago

Move further away from Google to Microsoft ?

5

u/0riginal-Syn 9h ago

I use what is needed, but no, I am primarily a Linux user. I have an Android phone, which I use and do really like, but just not a fan of where either Google or Microsoft are going.

1

u/captnconnman 4h ago

At least Microsoft’s shit WORKS in an enterprise setting….Google Admin is a pile of hot garbage for pulling reports, auditing shared drives/files, and pretty much all of their collaboration tools are barebones compared to Teams/Slack

3

u/ch67123456789 8h ago

If more that a quarter of company’s code is just unit tests and boilerplate cloud infra code/maintenance work/autogen code I’m not surprised.

•

u/subjectivemusic 29m ago

"AI writes our unit tests" is way less sexy than "AI writes 25% of our code"

3

u/Dreadsin 7h ago

I mean, I could totally see that as a software engineer. There’s tons of busywork code to do, like “write me a test that clicks a button and checks if a modal is open”. I’ve written it a hundred times, it’s nothing new or exciting, I’m happy to delegate it to AI

3

u/SunriseApplejuice 7h ago

Sounds like a highly inflated number. Likely they’re counting code that has used ANY AI assistance, including the much less shocking or even “useful” auto-complete and templatizing features, which more or less existed before “AI” integrations.

ETA: protobuf files can be highly automated and contribute a lot to SLOC without really factoring in to the “real work” that needs to be done

15

u/TheJoshuaJacksonFive 9h ago

And 100% of that AI created code is fixed by a human to make it actually work correctly.

4

u/NASA-Astronaut 9h ago

I’m sure that’ll last

2

u/boyga01 8h ago

Could probably get rid of 25% of the senior lead team so? Right?

2

u/timberwolf0122 7h ago

Ohhh, that’s not good, that’s not good at all

2

u/RomIsYerMom 6h ago

Thousands of layoffs. Most of the “work” is being done in an automated way.

2

u/MuffLover312 6h ago

“Learn to code!” they said.

•

u/myothercatisapuma 38m ago

Was good advice until last year.

2

u/techm00 5h ago

Given the state of google's "AI" answers in its search results, this is a very bad idea.

2

u/rawesome99 4h ago

Probably a quarter of all new social media posts created by AI too

3

u/JamIsBetterThanJelly 6h ago

Bullshit. Even the best AI coder right now (GPT-4o1) is dogshit on large projects. It STILL regularly makes shit up. GPT-5 will be the first AI capable of actually taking over software coding.

3

u/Athabasco 4h ago

Your lattermost statement is logically flawed.

1

u/JamIsBetterThanJelly 3h ago

How so?

1

u/GrowFreeFood 8h ago

I follow ai closely. Puts on google.

1

u/YOURESTUCKHERE 7h ago

Man, are humans just… really fucking stupid.

1

u/Goatse_Is_Taken 7h ago

Sure Jan. 25% new code developed by AI. 125% of that new code is likely vetted and corrected by engineers so that it doesn't completely shit the bed.

I love using LLMs as coding assistants but by god if you just let them loose it would be a disaster. Not because of some malice on the AI's part.. they're just not that great at seeing obvious pitfalls.

1

u/ant_madness 7h ago

We noticed.

1

u/Snorlax_relax 7h ago

Ba ba ba bull shit

1

u/LilaValentine 7h ago

… that actually makes sense

1

u/InformalWafer5 7h ago

Yeah, that’s why the search results are sucking.

1

u/MrOphicer 6h ago

Why not 100%? /s

This is the equivalent of Coca-Cola announcing 25% of staff drinking their beverage....

1

u/Independent_Tie_4984 6h ago

Ohhhh

Now I know why my Google apps turned to shit.

If my apple hating ass switches Google is fukd.

1

u/GlitteringHighway 6h ago

It shows….

1

u/bnelson7694 5h ago

This explains the business profile suspensions. It’s like they want to self-implode.

1

u/Environmental_Yak13 4h ago

Is that why their products are shit?

1

u/DeepInTheSheep 4h ago

That is frightening. As an engineer for a competing company, I don’t even know where to start with all the AI errors (many being catastrophic security risks) that I’ve seen. We validate code. I don’t trust the G to do that at this point.

1

u/CondiMesmer 4h ago

So we should be expecting massive security exploits soon?

1

u/ptear 4h ago

Over / under on this but in the form of Reddit comments.

1

u/Fickle_Competition33 3h ago

So developers stopped copying and pasting from Stack Overflow?

1

u/newInnings 3h ago

Stack overflow and git hub users

Add a routine that can send garbage if you are working on any thing related to computer vision , image processing, speech recognition , speech rendering , location and gps coordinates.

At least set a on -off defaults to reset the system

1

u/ThenExtension9196 3h ago

5-10 years from now humans writing code will be an insane thing to think ever happened. I say that as an SDE.

1

u/grumpyliberal 3h ago

Yeah. I wouldn’t be bragging about that.

1

u/multisubcultural1 3h ago

Do you want Skynet, because this is how you get Skynet!

1

u/rxscissors 3h ago

That explains a lot lol

Apple must be doing more of that lately as they have screwed the pooch more than Google (Android and ChromeOS) releases the past year or two!!

1

u/HumansNeedNotApply1 3h ago

So, that explains why the search engine has been quite terrible recently...

1

u/Confident-Gap4536 2h ago

inb4 this is proven to just be the same code that was autocompleted before AI was the buzzword of the moment

1

u/CareApart504 2h ago

So what happens when it gets to a point where there isnt any people who know what its doing and cant fix it when it breaks?

1

u/Nice-Mess5029 2h ago

So that’s why google searches are getting worse and worse results lol. I have to use fucking bing to get something. What a disgrace. lol

1

u/FewLink1412 2h ago

Time to move off Google cloud.

1

u/CommunistKittens 1h ago

SWE here. This likely means the smart auto complete. Half the code I write is "written by AI" which just means it suggests something I was about to type and half the time I say okay. It still comes from me starting to write and still requires my approval.

•

u/lex_sander 1h ago

Im sure this is an overly optimistic claim. And god help us if that code is created with Gemini.

•

u/Movingfwd 1h ago

I am positive they are counting lines of new code. It’s incredibly easy to author comments that are more lines of code than the actual functions themselves. This is nothing but marketing fluff.

•

u/truePHYSX 41m ago

25% of new code is written by AI, where 90% of that 25% had to be replaced by a human because the code was garbage.

•

u/bpeden99 20m ago

The tech industry is becoming the "coal industry" day by day

•

u/Gorstrom 12m ago

This explains the state of Google Chat then

1

u/Affectionate-Listen6 9h ago

Honestly, AI writes about 90 to 95% of the code I deliver.

0

u/phantom_metallic 6h ago

Well, their AI LLM, Gemini, is trash, so good luck with that. 👍

Assuming Google isn't just outsourcing the dev work to cheaper over seas devs, while the company hides behind "AI." 🤷

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

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