Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin Urges Developers to Embrace AI Coding Tools

Sergey Brin says he doesn't think Google engineers use AI for coding as much as they should

This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? Log in. The summit included a rare live appearance by Brin, who discussed the "mind blowing" advancement of AI. "As a computer scientist, I've never seen anything as exciting as all of the progress that's happened the last few years," Brin said. Brin, who said he's spending nearly every day at Google these days, praised AI's multi-faceted abilities, specifically with regard to programming. "Writing code from scratch feels really hard compared to just asking the AI to do it," Brin said to laughs from the audience. Brin said he was curious about how good Google's AI model would be at Sudoku. As an experiment, Brin had the model write code that would automatically generate versions of the puzzle. The test sparked some debate among Google engineers, Brin said. But when he came back just 30 minutes later, the model had successfully done its job, Brin said. "They were kind of impressed," Brin said of the engineers. "Because they don't honestly use the AI tools for their own coding as much as I think they ought to." Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. Brin, later in the conversation, also said that Google had been too "timid" to release its early language models because they made mistakes and said "embarrassing things." With AI's programming capabilities, Brin said, "You need to be willing to have some embarrassments and take some risks, and I think we've gotten better at that, and well, you guys have probably seen some of our embarrassments." Google's approach to utilizing AI hasn't stopped its employees from getting poached as the AI talent war heats up. Business Insider reported in June that OpenAI had hired at least 44 ex-Googlers this year alone, about half of whom were engineers. Google has taken a proactive approach in trying to stay AI-relevant. As search competition continues to heat up, Google recently updated its AI Overviews, which is a feature that produces AI-generated answers in response to a Google search. The company made the changes weeks after OpenAI revealed a rival search engine prototype. Engineers' caution around AI is not entirely unfounded. Coding tools are sparking anxiety in the industry about future job security. Earlier this month, BI reported that junior software developers are likely to see the most immediate changes to their workflow, with AI tools potentially changing the way newbies gain developer skills. At the All-In summit this week, Brin and Friedberg also discussed the future of human-AI interaction and the race to create human-like AI. The event featured several other big-name speakers, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Sergey Brin Says Developers Don't Use AI Tools for Coding as Much as They Ought to

"Writing code from scratch now feels really hard compared to just asking AI to do it." In a conversation with David Friedberg at the All-In Summit 2024, Sergey Brin, co-founder and former president at Google's parent company Alphabet said that writing code from scratch now feels really hard compared to just asking AI to do it. "I have written a little bit of code myself just for kicks, just for fun, and then sometimes I have had the AI write the code for me, which was fun," said Brin, giving an example of how he made an AI model write a bunch of code itself to generate Sudoku puzzles and solve it by itself, just to check how good the model is at Sudoku. This took him half an hour and after that he had a debate with developers and they were really impressed. This is when Brin said that "they don't honestly use the AI tools for their own coding as much as I think they ought to." This was in response to Friedberg asking Brin what exactly he does now at Google. The conversation went on to discuss Google's God Model approach and the race to AGI. "It's very helpful to have competition," said Brin, highlighting that it brings the best models out in the public. "When ChatGPT was launched, we were quite behind and I am really pleased with all the progress we have made," he added, while explaining that companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral, are moving fast, which is a good thing.