Google Execs Say Employees Have To 'Be More AI-Savvy' 52
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Google executives are pushing employees to act with more urgency in their use of artificial intelligence as the company looks for ways to cut costs. That was the message at an all-hands meeting last week, featuring CEO Sundar Pichai and Brian Saluzzo, who runs the teams building the technical foundation for Google's flagship products. "Anytime you go through a period of extraordinary investment, you respond by adding a lot of headcount, right?" Pichai said, according to audio obtained by CNBC. "But in this AI moment, I think we have to accomplish more by taking advantage of this transition to drive higher productivity. [...] We are competing with other companies in the world," Pichai said at the meeting. "There will be companies which will become more efficient through this moment in terms of employee productivity, which is why I think it's important to focus on that." [...]
"We are going to be going through a period of much higher investment and I think we have to be frugal with our resources, and I would strive to be more productive and efficient as a company," Pichai said, adding that he's "very optimistic" about how Google is doing. At the meeting, Saluzzo highlighted a number of tools the company is building for software engineers, or SWEs, to help "everybody at Google be more AI-savvy." "We feel the urgency to really quickly and urgently get AI into more of the coding workflows to address top needs so you see a much more rapid increase in velocity," Saluzzo said. Saluzzo said Google has a portfolio of AI products available to employees "so folks can go faster." He mentioned an internal site called "AI Savvy Google" which has courses, toolkits and learning sessions, including some for individual product areas.
Google's engineering education team, which develops courses for internal and external use, partnered with DeepMind on a training called "Building with Gemini" that the company will start promoting soon, Saluzzo said. He also referenced a new internal AI coding tool called Cider that helps software engineers with various aspects of the development process. Since May, when the company first introduced Cider, 50% of users tap the service on a weekly basis, Saluzzo said. Regarding Google's internal AI tools, Saluzzo said that employees should "expect them to continuously get better" and that "they'll become a pretty integral part of most SWE work."
"We are going to be going through a period of much higher investment and I think we have to be frugal with our resources, and I would strive to be more productive and efficient as a company," Pichai said, adding that he's "very optimistic" about how Google is doing. At the meeting, Saluzzo highlighted a number of tools the company is building for software engineers, or SWEs, to help "everybody at Google be more AI-savvy." "We feel the urgency to really quickly and urgently get AI into more of the coding workflows to address top needs so you see a much more rapid increase in velocity," Saluzzo said. Saluzzo said Google has a portfolio of AI products available to employees "so folks can go faster." He mentioned an internal site called "AI Savvy Google" which has courses, toolkits and learning sessions, including some for individual product areas.
Google's engineering education team, which develops courses for internal and external use, partnered with DeepMind on a training called "Building with Gemini" that the company will start promoting soon, Saluzzo said. He also referenced a new internal AI coding tool called Cider that helps software engineers with various aspects of the development process. Since May, when the company first introduced Cider, 50% of users tap the service on a weekly basis, Saluzzo said. Regarding Google's internal AI tools, Saluzzo said that employees should "expect them to continuously get better" and that "they'll become a pretty integral part of most SWE work."
I invented the hammer (Score:1)
I know, you're proficient with a screwdriver but I insist you use this hammer instead. your future at the company depends on it.
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Well played google, well played indeed...
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Close but not quite.
This is "I know you're proficient with a shovel, but excavators have been a thing for a couple of years. Time to learn how to operate them, and do the same job you could do with a shovel in a week in an hour with an excavator."
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The thing is, what you actually get is closer to some HGTTG's infinite improbability shovel instead
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That's what naysayers are trying to spin it as, and yet for much of the digging of that specific type, replacement with excavators has already happened.
They're just early, and somewhat unreliable excavators, so you need a specific skill set to operate and maintain them. But they're way, WAY more efficient than shovels.
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That's what naysayers are trying to spin it as, and yet for much of the digging of that specific type, replacement with excavators has already happened.
That's actually the problem. The low-hanging fruit has already been picked. For situations where excavators make sense, they've already been adopted. Trying to push the use of excavators significantly beyond where they make sense will just cause a bunch of dug-up power lines and gas mains.
People don't avoid AI because they're afraid of it. They avoid AI because they've tried it, it didn't work, and they learned to be cautious and use it only where it makes sense. Pushing back against that is likely to
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"People avoid new thing, because they tried it without relevant skillset, and it didn't work".
Yes. This happens all the time. If such "people" are employed, this is where you tell them to learn necessary skills so it works next time. If they refuse, this is where you terminate their employment, and look to hire people to have the relevant skillset to replace them.
Btw, have you seen the IT job market right now, who's being hunted by recruiters with hilarious signing bonuses and salaries, and who's struggling
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"People avoid new thing, because they tried it without relevant skillset, and it didn't work".
Yes. This happens all the time. If such "people" are employed, this is where you tell them to learn necessary skills so it works next time. If they refuse, this is where you terminate their employment, and look to hire people to have the relevant skillset to replace them.
Good luck with the giant pile of technical debt you're guaranteed to end up with by taking that approach. AI does some things well. It does some things very, very badly. Right now, for writing code, AI makes experienced developers slower *and* makes them think that they are *faster*. Meanwhile, junior devs get faster, but mostly because they don't notice how much the quality has dropped. So the folks who don't fully know what they're doing are creating mountains of additional tech debt while the senior
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This is no different from having all the technical debt from needing completely novel maintenance and logistics networks and novel pollution types from moving from horse powered economy to oil powered one.
We just take care of the novel problems as they come up, and we're way, WAAAAY better off because we moved off horses to oil.
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That's actually the problem. The low-hanging fruit has already been picked. For situations where excavators make sense, they've already been adopted. Trying to push the use of excavators significantly beyond where they make sense will just cause a bunch of dug-up power lines and gas mains.
In Luckyo's world those people are all "artisanal diggers" and don't count.
People don't avoid AI because they're afraid of it. They avoid AI because they've tried it, it didn't work, and they learned to be cautious and use
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But they're way, WAY more efficient than shovels.
[Citation needed]
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Microsoft.
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So do you, and so do I, and so does every single human being on the planet.
So?
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Stop making things up, do better research or don't post it.
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If excavators have made shovels obsolete, then why does every builders yard still sell shovels?
The analogy works be better if the excavator fails to dig half the time, or even better gives a really good impression of digging but somehow had managed to actually slightly full the hole instead without you noticing.
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Because there's still use for artisanal digging.
Same reason why there's still gardening, millenia after farming has been invented. It's way less efficient, utterly useless at scale, but there are edge cases where excavator is just too big and too inaccurate for the job.
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Artisanal digging, wtf are you talking about.
I've encountered people like you at the local maker space before, the kind who cannot understand why in a world with power tools, one would ever use an obsolete and inefficient hand tool. Those people would usually make a complete mess of their work pieces and often damage the tools. The hind of person who will attempt to cut flexible conduit with a power saw of some sort rather than a junior hacksaw.
The purpose of building work isn't to simply dig the largest
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It's rare to read someone so utterly disconnected from reality in his ivory tower as this spiel. Let's get into it.
1. Artisanal digging is still a thing. It's when you have to be really gentle with digging. Digging around tree roots you're not supposed to touch for example. Or very small scale applications, like digging a planting hole in a yard for gardening purposes.
For smaller holes, there are smaller excavators, with smaller attachments. Smallest digging attachments for those are smaller than large shov
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What I want to know is why you think contractors on the clock are engaging in "artisanal digging". That's a bizarre assumption.
Do these look like "artisanal diggers" to you?
https://www.fmconway.co.uk/fil... [fmconway.co.uk]
How about these guys?
https://www.dreamstime.com/roa... [dreamstime.com]
Or this one will annoy you even more because not only is there a VDE shovel handle in the foreground there's also a hardpoint saw:
https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/... [gettyimages.co.uk]
None of them are "artisans", they're all contractors doing a job.
Gardening's purpose is
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Let me guess. You think "artisanal" means "hobbyist", because, and I quote myself:
>Overall, this is very much "but current day tech level is baseline from which all my views come, and I have no idea how anything below that tech level works" level of privileged babble.
And surely only people who would engage in artisanal things are rich twats doing a silly hobby, not because there's some usefulness in artisanal work. You know this because you garden for fun, and don't even know where gardening originates.
I
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That deasciptionn from Wikipedia
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Are you under the impression artisanal means "Art is anal" or something? Maybe you think an artisanal digger is some crude roughneck who hates art and calls it "gay"?
I'm trying to fully comprehend why you think there's anything artisanal about road building. It sounds like you've just heard the word and are trying to apply it to everything right now regardless of whether it makes any sense. You didn't even bother to look at the definition on the Word of the Day calendar your mom got you.
(Helpful hint: in fu
Sundar is more worried about leaving Chrome (Score:2)
Who does the work? (Score:1)
AI Savvy (Score:5, Insightful)
AI-savvy employees would tell executives exactly what kind of bullshit hype AI is. Is that really what executives want?
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Exactly the opposite at my company. The most anti-AI are the ones who have used it because they refuse to learn anything new. These people also struggle to use their web browser and their email client.
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who have not used it*
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AI-savvy employees would tell executives exactly what kind of bullshit hype AI is. Is that really what executives want?
If it makes another penny in stock price, fuck yes.
Cider is not new (Score:2)
It's Google's internal IDE and has been for a while.
https://rotate.cc/blog/google-... [rotate.cc]
They are talking about AI features in Cider.
If something is worth something (Score:5, Insightful)
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Of course this will only work if people have the freedom to experiment, and their suggestions are heard, and make their way back into the product. That's hard to do at a big company.
Lemme see if I understand this (Score:2)
Time to leave (Score:5, Insightful)
In an email to employees, Jassy wrote that employees should...experiment and figure out “how to get more done with scrappier teams.”
This is a sign to start looking elsewhere. A red flag, if you will. Things are not going to get better.
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What's worrying is the explicit urgency... They know something is brewing. Will AI-agents hit some sort of critical mass---e.g. become 99% of internet traffic, rendering their ad-business useless, etc.? What are they scared of?
A killer app for AI would be to filter out all advertising...
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What's worrying is the explicit urgency
The tailors need to skip town with their money before the emperor discovers that he's stark naked [wikipedia.org]. We're still at the point where only the inept and stupid can't see the benefits. The truly wise are all nodding and admiring the new clothes, lest they be lumped in with the aforementioned category.
Must really suck at Google right now (Score:2)
So imagine that you've gotten into Google as an engineer, proved that you are somewhat intelligent, and now you have to deal with this.
The AI-savvy employee (Score:5, Funny)
The AI-savvy employee will fire up the AI-thingy Google gives them gratuitously but randomly a few times a day. Crisis in management averted. Any other management emotional problems can be handled by AI-Psycho, the new (and improved) management tool expressly for the watering and feeding of management delusions. Caution: only to be used by AUTHORIZED management, failure to follow this warning might result in irreversible brain damage and/or the heartbreak of psoriasis.
Pichai stating the obvious (Score:2)
I had an idea about how to improve a microservice yesterday while eating lunch. I described it to my AI coding assistant (a chat panel in the IDE), it understood right away. I broke the implementation task out into incremental steps that are about the right size for an AI to accomplish one by one. In a little more than an hour I had the complete solution along with a test utility to verify the functionality and a comprehensive readme that documents the entire service plus the changes. It would have taken me
Re: Pichai stating the obvious (Score:2)
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I'm thinking you don't work as a coder in a scrum shop, where you get your daily work assignments at the morning standup and try to move your Jira tickets to the right. In that situation coding speed matters quite a bit.
Re: Pichai stating the obvious (Score:2)
Define savvy. (Score:2)
The precision of the English language is lacking, imho.
Is that a technical term? because I'm a little fuzzy on on how to BE savvy.
I haven't looked very far, but I haven't seen much in the way of structured methodologies to approach using AI for code development, which I imagine most devs are going to need vs. just winging it.
Sundar needs to go (Score:2)
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Any executive who refers to their staff as “headcount” in a town hall type meeting is a ridiculously bad leader.
There is a real possibility that he wants his employees to feel bad.
More AI-Savvy (Score:2)
Got it, boss. Our group has just put the finishing touches on our new "Pichai-bot". When should it go live?
AI future bleak (Score:2)