‘AI won't replace human coders anytime soon’: Google CEO Sundar Pichai

Google CEO Sundar Pichai, in a recent podcast with Lex Fridman, discussed the growing role of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly tools like Gemini, and its impact on jobs such as programming. Pichai said that AI would serve as a powerful partner to enhance the capabilities of human programmers, and not replace them anytime soon.

Sundar Pichai on AI

The CEO said that because of AI, the ‘opportunity space’ to do more is expanding as well.

According to Pichai, while coding can be enjoyable, it also involves a fair amount of repetitive or time-consuming tasks. “But it (AI) hopefully takes a lot of that away, makes it even more fun to code, frees you up more time to create, problem-solve, brainstorm with your fellow colleagues, and so on. So, that's the opportunity there.”

“And second,” he added, “I think it'll attract, it'll put the creative power in more people's hands, which means people create more, that means there'll be more engineers doing more things.”

He confirmed Google’s plans to continue hiring engineers.

Pichai disclosed that around 30% of the code written at Google today is assisted by AI. He remarked that AI is increasing the "engineering velocity" of the company. 

“But the most important metric, and we carefully measure this, how much has our engineering velocity increased as a company due to AI,” the Google CEO said. “And it's tough to measure, and we rigorously try to measure it. And our estimates are that number is now at 10%.”

Pichai claimed that AI tools are not replacing developers but instead helping them improve. According to him, the techies can “adopt these tools and become better programmers.”

The CEO shares qualities he expects in his successor

At a recent tech conference in San Francisco, Sundar Pichai discussed the qualities he believes the future leader of Google should possess. While he did not name potential successors or hint at stepping down soon, he shared that the next CEO must have the power and responsibility to lead a giant concern like Google.

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