Alphabet CEO Sunda Pichai made a surprising revelation, saying Google is now using AI to write more than a quarter of all new code.

Pichai made the statement in the company’s Q3 2024 earnings call.

We’re also using AI internally to improve our coding processes, which is boosting productivity and efficiency. Today, more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers. This helps our engineers do more and move faster.

Pichai’s statement echoes a recent interview of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, in which he touted the benefits of using AI to generate code, even saying he didn’t feel the company’s engineers were using it enough.

“I think that AI touches so many different elements of day-to-day life, and sure, search is one of them,” [Brin said](“I think that AI touches so many different elements of day-to-day life, and sure, search is one of them,” Brin said. “But it kind of covers everything. For example, programming itself, the way that I think about it is very different now.). “But it kind of covers everything. For example, programming itself, the way that I think about it is very different now.

“Writing code from scratch feels really hard, compared to just asking the AI to do it,” Brin continued, to laughter from the audience. “I’ve written a little bit of code myself, just for kicks, just for fun. And then sometimes I’ve had the AI write the code for me, which was fun.”

“They were kind of impressed because they don’t honestly use the AI tools for their own coding as much as I think they ought to,” he added.

Gemini Insights

Pichai said Gemini use was growing dramatically, both in users and across the company’s platforms.

Our research teams also drive our industry-leading Gemini model capabilities, including long context understanding, multimodality, and agentive capabilities. By any measure — token volume, API calls, consumer usage, business adoption — usage of the Gemini models is in a period of dramatic growth. And our teams are actively working on performance improvements and new capabilities for our range of models. Stay tuned!

And they’re building out experiences where AI can see and reason about the world around you. Project Astra is a glimpse of that future. We’re working to ship experiences like this as early as 2025.

We then work to bring those advances to consumers and businesses: Today, all seven of our products and platforms with more than 2 billion monthly users use Gemini models. That includes the latest product to surpass the 2 billion user milestone, Google Maps. Beyond Google’s own platforms, following strong demand, we’re making Gemini even more broadly available to developers. Today we shared that Gemini is now available on GitHub Copilot, with more to come.

Google has made a change to the Gemini team’s organization, in an effort to speed up further development.

We recently moved the Gemini app team to Google DeepMind to speed up deployment of new models, and streamline post-training work. This follows other structural changes that have unified teams in research, machine learning infrastructure and our developer teams, as well as our security efforts and our Platforms and Devices team. This is all helping us move faster. For instance, it was a small, dedicated team that built Notebook LM, an incredibly popular product that has so much promise.

Conclusion

Overall, Pichai’s comments are a fascinating look into how AI is revolutionizing Big Tech, giving companies the ability to develop and innovate at a faster pace.