Even the top tech firms are changing how they write code as the AI revolution accelerates.
Google has said that “well over 30 percent” of code written at the company is now written by AI. Pichai had said just four months ago that the amount of code written by AI at that time was around 25 percent. This indicates that at this pace, the amount of code written by AI is set to nearly double in a full year.
“In terms of how we are using Al for coding, we are continuing to make a lot of progress there in terms of people using coding suggestions,” Pichai said in an earnings call. “I think the last time I had said the number was, like, 25% of code that’s checked in. It involves people accepting Al suggested solutions. That number is well over 30% now,” he added.
“Internally, (use of AI) has been an extraordinary amount of focus and excitement both because I think we are the early use cases have been transformative in nature, and I think there’s still feels like early days and long ways to go,” Pichai said.
Google isn’t the only company that’s heavily using AI to write code. Salesforce has said that it won’t hire any human engineers this year because of the efficiency gains it’s seeing from AI. Inmobi, meanwhile, has said that 80 percent of the code at the company will be generated by AI by the end of the year, and people will likely lose jobs.
But Google writes some of the most sophisticated code out there that powers its products and services, and Google engineers are some of the best-paid in the world. If Google says that more than 30 percent of its code is now being written with AI, it could either mean that writing software now is easier than ever, and there could be an explosion in the number of software products in the coming years. But if there’s no demand for this much software, the number of people required to write it will come down dramatically, which could lead to job losses in the entire industry. It remains to be seen how the software industry copes with the advent of AI, but it seems clear that AI is changing how code is written at even the top engineering companies in the world.