What you need to know
- During Alphabet’s recent earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that more than a quarter of Google’s new code is generated using AI.
- The CEO also indicated that the AI-generated code is double-checked by engineers for errors and mistakes before it’s accepted.
- Software, banking, and architecture jobs are among the top professions on AI’s chopping block.
Microsoft’s just-announced earnings for its fiscal first quarter exceeded Wall Street analysts’ predictions and speculations due to its thriving cloud computing business as more businesses embrace the AI hype.
For context, the Redmond giant reported $65.6 billion in revenue for the first quarter of fiscal year 2025, which translates to a 16% increase compared to the previous year’s results. The same growth is consistent across its gaming division, which reported a 43% increase in revenue year-over-year, thanks to the Activision Blizzard King acquisition.
Alphabet shared the same success in its recent earnings call, citing a 34% increase in revenue year-over-year. Perhaps more interestingly, CEO Sundar Pichai indicated that Google leverages generative AI capabilities to generate a quarter of its new code (via Tom’s Hardware):
“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.”
Over the past few months, it’s become more apparent that software development and coding seemingly have a high affinity for automation using AI. This is especially true in the AI era, with models progressing from text and image generation tasks to complex tasks.
What does the future of coding look like with the prevalence of AI?
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang shared interesting insights about the progression of generative AI, citing its transition to the next phase with humanoid robots and self-driving cars at the frontline. Huang suggested that coding could be dead in the water with the rapid progression of AI. The executive views software development and coding as a volatile career path for future generations, recommending biology, education, manufacturing, or farming as plausible alternative career options.
Huang’s sentiments aren’t entirely off the mark, especially with the emergence of advanced AI models like OpenAI-o1 and GPT-4o that ship with sophisticated capabilities, allowing them to write and detect errors in code. For instance, OpenAI-o1 recently aced an OpenAI research engineer hiring interview for coding at a 90-100% rate.
Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman seems to share Huang’s sentiments about the landscape. “If you go forward 24 months from now, or some amount of time—I can’t exactly predict where it is—it’s possible that most developers are not coding,” added Garman.
Interestingly, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai admitted that the code generated using AI needs to be double-checked and accepted by actual engineers, potentially indicating that the tech is seemingly half-baked and could be prone to mistakes. Coincidentally, recent Claude AI demos shared by Anthropic showed the chatbot aborting a coding exercise to scroll through scenic pictures of a national park on Google. ,As AI becomes more advanced, more jobs, including banking, software development, interior design, and architecture, pile on the chopping block. Interestingly, Microsoft’s latest Work Trend Index report claimed company executives have raised concerns over a lack of talent for the vacancies in their organizations. The report also revealed that company executives won’t hire anyone without an AI aptitude, prompting “a 142x increase in LinkedIn members adding AI skills like Copilot and ChatGPT to their profiles.”
Affected parties by the hostile AI takeover of human jobs aren’t pleased with the changes. A game developer revealed that multiple game studios are embracing AI game development but still need developers to look over the code generated using AI for mistakes and errors. “The stuff that AI generates, you become the person whose job is fixing it,” the developer added. “It’s not why I got into making games.”
While responding to the claims of AI taking over human jobs, former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati:
“Some creative jobs maybe will go away. But maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place — you know, if the content that comes out of it is not very high quality.”
The next few years will be rocky for AI, but the outcome for developers remains to be seen.
