AI generates more than a quarter of all new code at Google
Google’s parent company Alphabet announced its quarterly results on Tuesday. A key highlight of the earnings call with company CEO Sundar Pichai was how the Mountain View-based tech giant is optimizing the costs of running expensive artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure for all of its products and services. The CEO said the company has now started generating more than a quarter of all new code using generative AI, allowing the company to be more cost-efficient.
Google releases Q3 2024 revenue highlights
In one blog postGoogle detailed the highlights from Pichai’s earnings call speech. Much of the talk was dedicated to AI and how the tech giant has solved major pain points in building and scaling infrastructure. Alphabet posted revenues of $88.3 billion (about Rs. 7.4 lakh crore) in the previous quarter, with most of the revenue increase coming from the AI-based services it started offering early this year.
Much of the increased revenue was the result of the company cutting expenses and moving faster with a streamlined structure, Pichai pointed out. “For example, it was a small, dedicated team that built Notebook LM, an incredibly popular product that holds so much promise,” he added.
However, the tech giant’s biggest achievement was probably using AI to write code for various products. Highlighting how the company could increase productivity and efficiency, he said that more than a quarter of all new code at Google is now generated by AI, which is then reviewed and accepted by engineers.
An important area of focus for Google is its search products, which now also include the 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 important is AI Overviews, which is said to have “reduced the cost of these queries by more than 90 percent through hardware, engineering and technical breakthroughs.”
Google also witnessed an increase in revenue in Google Cloud services. Pichai said the division has achieved a turnover of $11.4 billion (approximately Rs. 95,850 crores), which is an increase of 35 percent year-on-year. It also secured an operating margin of 17 percent.
Going forward, the tech giant plans to continue investing in AI technologies, scaling its capabilities and further optimizing costs.
