Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently revealed that AI now creates more than a quarter of new code for its products, according to the company’s earnings call. In other words, AI tools are already having a huge impact on software development.
Pichai said human programmers oversee the code created by computers, which is a big deal. The CEO said AI coding helps “increase productivity and efficiency,” ensuring engineers “get more done and move faster.” There’s no doubt about it.
25 percent is a lot, and Google is just one company that relies on AI algorithms to perform complex coding tasks. According to Stack Overflow’s 2024 developer survey, more than 75 percent of respondents are already using or “plan to use” AI tools to aid in software development. Another survey conducted by GitHub indicated that 92 percent of U.S.-based developers are currently using AI coding tools.
This leads us to the raging elephant in the room. As AI continues to swallow up coding tasks, the human experience is starting to diminish.
This could eventually lead to a knowledge base in which humans don’t know how to fix errors made by AI algorithms that, in turn, were made by other AI algorithms. We could be stuck in a climate of confusion where it’s nearly impossible to spot bugs between generations of AI code. Fun times!
We’re not there yet, but AI-assisted coding is showing no signs of slowing down. The process began its meteoric rise in the 1980s. In 2022 GitHub launched its Copilot program widely. Since then, companies like Anthropic, Meta, Google, and OpenAI have released AI-coding software suites. GitHub recently announced that Copilot can now be used with models from Anthropic and Google in addition to OpenAI.
Amid signs of stagnation in the economy, the UK is focusing heavily on AI. On Monday, British minister Keir Starmer announced a new AI Opportunities Action Plan. At the heart of the initiative are “AI Growth Zones,” which the government plans to set up in non-industrial areas across the country.
In these zones, the Labour government will speed up planning approvals for data centers and provide better access to the national energy grid. Starmer said the UK’s first AI Growth Zone will be set up in Culham, Oxfordshire, home to the country’s nuclear energy authority. More zones will be announced in the summer.
At the same time, Starmer’s government plans to increase state-owned computing capacity 20-fold, starting with the “immediate” construction of a new supercomputer that will have “so much AI power it can play chess five million times a second.” By November 2024, the UK has 14 supercomputers on the TOP500 list, putting it well behind the US and China.