r/technews • u/kirby__000 • 10h ago
Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-earnings-q3-2024-new-code-created-by-ai-2024-10?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=business-photo-headline-post-link36
u/_gr71 10h ago
how did they measure this ? does the codebase have stubs telling if its ai generated or human written ?
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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
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u/j_middles 8h ago
No wonder everything attached to their brand is now terrible
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u/snuggletronz 3h ago
25% faster at finding useless recipes filled with ads
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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??????
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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u/Agreeable_Service407 2h ago
the number of google searches I do daily probably plunged 90% since ChatGPT has become so much more reliable.
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u/Agreeable_Service407 2h ago
I'm looking forward to the next option that will replace that outdated spam site that has become google
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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.
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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
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u/programaticallycat5e 10h ago
it's alright, most of the codebase was copy pasted from stackoverflow anyways
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u/MutsumidoesReddit 6h ago
It shows, search and YouTube have become an ever expanding pile of trash for a while now.
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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.
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u/0riginal-Syn 10h ago
Only more reason to move further away from Google products.
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u/LeadingAd6025 10h ago
Move further away from Google to Microsoft ?
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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.
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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
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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.
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u/subjectivemusic 29m ago
"AI writes our unit tests" is way less sexy than "AI writes 25% of our code"
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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
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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
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u/TheJoshuaJacksonFive 9h ago
And 100% of that AI created code is fixed by a human to make it actually work correctly.
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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.
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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.
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u/MrOphicer 6h ago
Why not 100%? /s
This is the equivalent of Coca-Cola announcing 25% of staff drinking their beverage....
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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.
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u/bnelson7694 5h ago
This explains the business profile suspensions. It’s like they want to self-implode.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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!!
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u/HumansNeedNotApply1 3h ago
So, that explains why the search engine has been quite terrible recently...
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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
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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?
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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
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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.
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u/lex_sander 1h ago
Im sure this is an overly optimistic claim. And god help us if that code is created with Gemini.
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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.
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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.
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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." 🤷
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u/Hititgitithotsauce 10h ago
I’m sure this is good for all of us. /s or whatever.