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

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.