“This helps our engineers do more and move faster.”
Code Caller
During Google’s latest quarterly earnings call, the tech giant’s CEO boasted that a large percentage of its new code is written by artificial intelligence.
In the Q3 call that reported both shares and revenue are up, CEO Sundar Pichai noted that a whopping 25 percent of Google’s code is being generated by AI — though of course, there’s a catch.
“Today, more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers,” the CEO said during the call, a transcript of which was published by the company shortly thereafter. “This helps our engineers do more and move faster.”
The part of Pichai’s proclamation about engineers doing more and moving “faster” may be complicated by the reality of AI programming assistants, which have been found to insert errors into code, infringe on copyright, and in some cases even cause outages.
When cases like the aforementioned present themselves, programmers — who are now forced to become AI prompt masters — have to manually fix any issues created by their AI helpers. Though he didn’t mention it outright, Google’s CEO even alluded to those necessary human hours by noting that all the company’s AI-generated code has to be reviewed and accepted by engineers.
The entire state of play begs the question: wouldn’t it be faster and far less tedious to just let the programmers do their jobs?
Overview Oversight
While Pichai didn’t note exactly which of the company’s AI products are writing the code, he did mention a few of its other offerings in the same subsection of the Q3 call, including its newly-rebranded Gemini chatbot and its Notebook Language Model (LM), an AI note-taking app.
The CEO went on to boast about Google Search’s AI Overviews, which the company has newly rolled out in more than a hundred new countries this week and which, per Pichai, “leads to users coming to Search more often for more of their information needs, driving additional search queries.”
“We’re seeing strong engagement,” he continued, “which is increasing overall search usage and user satisfaction.”
Naturally, the CEO didn’t mention in the investor call that the company’s AI Overviews in Search have not only been repeatedly proven to be full of incorrect information, but are now also being stuffed with irritating ads that nobody wants.
With the AI revolution fully underfoot, it appears that at Google — as with Microsoft, Meta, and most other firms that are all-in on the burgeoning technology — the emperor has no clothes.
Luckily for Pichai, the company’s investors don’t seem to care.
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