Google Generating ‘More Than a Quarter of All New Code by AI’, Says CEO Sundar Pichai

Google’s parent company Alphabet posted its quarterly earnings on Tuesday. A major highlight of the earnings call with company CEO Sundar Pichai was how the Mountain View-based tech giant is optimising the costs of running expensive artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure for all of its products and services. The CEO said that the company has now started generating more than one-fourth of all of the new code using generative AI, which has allowed the company to be more cost-efficient.

Google Posts Revenue Highlights of Q3 2024

In a blog post, Google detailed the highlights from Pichai’s speech at the earnings call. A large part of the speech was dedicated to AI and how the tech giant has solved major pain points in building and scaling the infrastructure. Alphabet posted a revenue of $88.3 billion (roughly Rs. 7.4 lakh crore) in revenue in the previous quarter, where the majority of the increase in revenue came from the AI-based services it started offering at the beginning of the year.

A large part of the increased revenue was a result of the company reducing its expenditure and working faster with a lean structure, Pichai highlighted. “For instance, it was a small, dedicated team that built Notebook LM, an incredibly popular product that has so much promise,” he added.

However, the biggest achievement for the tech giant was probably in using AI to write code for various products. Highlighting how the company was able to boost productivity and efficiency, he said that more than a quarter of all new code at Google is now being generated by AI, which is then reviewed and accepted by engineers.

One major area of focus for Google is its Search products, which now include its search engine, Circle to Search, AI Overviews, and Google Lens. Pichai claimed that the company has been able to reduce costs for each of the services. The most significant is AI Overviews which is said to have “reduced costs by more than 90 percent for these queries through hardware, engineering, and technical breakthrough.”

Google also witnessed a revenue increase in Google Cloud services. Pichai said that the division secured revenue of 11.4 billion dollars (roughly Rs. 95,850 crores), which is an increase of 35 percent year-on-year. It also secured operating margins of 17 percent.

Moving forward, the tech giant plans to continue to invest in AI technologies, scaling its capabilities, and further optimising costs.