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Watch: Google's Gemini Code Assist wants to use AI to help developers

April 18, 2024 7:17 PM0


Can AI eat the jobs of the developers who are busy building AI models? The short answer is no, but the longer answer is not yet settled. News this week that Google has a new AI-powered coding tool for developers, straight from the company’s Google Cloud Next 2024 event in Las Vegas, means that competitive pressures between major tech companies to build the best service to help coders write more code, more quickly is still heating up.

Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot service that has similar outlines has been steadily working toward enterprise adoption. Both companies want to eventually build developer-helping tech that can understand a company’s codebase, allowing it to offer up more tailored suggestions and tips.

Startups are in the fight as well, though they tend to focus more tailored solutions than the broader offerings from the largest tech companies; Pythagora, Tusk and Ellipsis from the most recent Y Combinator batch are working on app creation from user prompts, AI agents for bug-squashing and turning GitHub comments into code, respectively.

Everywhere you look, developers are building tools and services to help their own professional cohort.

Developers learning to code today won’t know a world in which they don’t have AI-powered coding helps. Call it the graphic calculator era for software builders. But the risk — or the worry, I suppose — is that in time the AI tools that are ingesting mountains of code to get smarter to help humans do more will eventually be able to do enough that fewer humans are needed to do the work of writing code for companies themselves. And if a company can spend less money and employ fewer people, it will; no job is safe, but some roles are just more difficult to replace at any given moment.

Thankfully, given the complexities of modern software services, ever-present tech debt and an infinite number of edge cases, what big tech and startups are busy building today seem to be very useful coding helps and not something ready to replace or even reduce the number of humans building them. For now. I wouldn’t take the other end of that bet on a multi-decade time frame.

And for those looking for an even deeper dive into what Google revealed this week, you can head here for our complete rundown, including details on exactly how Gemini Code Assist works, and Google’s in-depth developer walkthrough from Cloud Next 2024.


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New Google Vids product helps create a customized video with an AI assist | TechCrunch

April 18, 2024 3:47 AM0


All of the major vendors have been looking at ways to use AI to help customers develop creative content. On Tuesday at the Google Cloud Next customer conference in Las Vegas, Google introduced a new AI-fueled video creation tool called Google Vids. The tool will become part of the Google Workspace productivity suite when it’s released.

“I want to share something really entirely new. At Google Cloud Next, we’re unveiling Google Vids, a brand new, AI-powered video creation app for work,” Aparna Pappu, VP & GM at Google Workspace said, introducing the tool.

Image Credits: Frederic Lardinois/TechCrunch

The idea is to provide a video creation tool alongside other Workspace tools like Docs and Sheets with a similar ability to create and collaborate in the browser, except in this case, on video. “This is your video editing, writing and production assistant, all in one,” Pappu said. “We help transform the assets you already have — whether marketing copy or images or whatever else in your drive — into a compelling video.”

Like other Google Workspace tools, you can collaborate with colleagues in real time in the browser. “No need to email files back and forth. You and your team can work on the story at the same time with all the same access controls and security that we provide for all of Workspace,” she said.

Image Credits: Google Cloud

Examples of the kinds of videos people are creating with Google Vids include product pitches, training content or celebratory team videos. Like most generative AI tooling, Google Vids starts with a prompt. You enter a description of what you want the video to look like. You can then access files in your Google Drive or use stock content provided by Google and the AI goes to work, creating a storyboard of the video based on your ideas.

You can then reorder the different parts of the video, add transitions, select a template and insert an audio track where you record the audio or add a script and a preset voice will read it. Once you’re satisfied, you can generate the video. Along the way colleagues can comment or make changes, just as with any Google Workspace tool.

Google Vids is currently in limited testing. In June it will roll out to additional testers in Google Labs and will eventually be available for customers with Gemini for Workspace subscriptions.

Image Credits: Frederic Lardinois/TechCrunch

Google Cloud Next 2024: Everything announced so far


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Google launches Code Assist, its latest challenger to GitHub's Copilot | TechCrunch

April 17, 2024 5:57 PM0


At its Cloud Next conference, Google on Tuesday unveiled Gemini Code Assist, its enterprise-focused AI code completion and assistance tool.

If this sounds familiar, that’s likely because Google previously offered a similar service under the now-defunct Duet AI branding. That one became generally available in late 2023, but even then, Google already hinted that it would move the service away from its Codey model to Gemini in the near future. Code Assist is both a rebrand of the older service as well as a major update.

Code Assist, which Google Cloud demoed at its 30,000-attendee conference in Las Vegas, will be available through plug-ins for popular editors like VS Code and JetBrains.

Even more so than the Duet AI version, Code Assist is also a direct competitor to GitHub’s Copilot Enterprise and not so much the basic version of Copilot. That’s because of a few Google-specific twists.

Among those is support for Gemini 1.5 Pro, which famously has a million-token context window, allowing Google’s tool to pull in a lot more context than its competitors. Google says this means more-accurate code suggestions, for example, but also the ability to reason over and change large chunks of code.

“This upgrade brings a massive 1 million-token context window, which is the largest in the industry. This allows customers to perform large-scale changes across your entire code base, enabling AI-assisted code transformations that were not possible before,” Brad Calder, Google’s VP and GM for its cloud platform and technical infrastructure, explained in a press conference ahead of Tuesday’s announcement.

Image Credits: Google

Like GitHub Enterprise, Code Assist can also be fine-tuned based on a company’s internal code base.

“Code customization using RAG with Gemini Code Assist significantly increased the quality of Gemini’s assistance for our developers in terms of code completion and generation,” said Kai Du, Director of Engineering and Head of Generative AI at Turing. “With code customization in place, we are expecting a big increase in the overall code-acceptance rate.”

This functionality is currently in preview.

Image Credits: Frederic Lardinois/TechCrunch

Another feature that makes Code Assist stand out is its ability to support codebases that sit on-premises, in GitLab, GitHub and Atlassian’s BitBucket, for example, as well as those that may be split between different services. That’s something Google’s most popular competitors in this space don’t currently offer.

Google is also partnering with a number of developer-centric companies to bring their knowledge bases to Gemini. Stack Overflow already announced its partnership with Google Cloud earlier this year. Datadog, Datastax, Elastic, HashiCorp, Neo4j, Pinecone, Redis, Singlestore and Snyk are now also partnering with Google through similar partnerships.

The real test, of course, is how developers will react to Code Assist and how useful its suggestions are to them. Google is making the right moves here by supporting a variety of code repositories and offering a massive context window, but if the latency is too high or the results simply aren’t that good, none of those features matter. And if it’s not significantly better than Copilot, which had quite a headstart, it may end up suffering the fate of AWS’ CodeWhisperer, which seems to have close to zero momentum.

It’s worth noting that in addition to Code Assist, Google today also announced the launch of CodeGemma, a new open model in its Gemma family that was fine-tuned for code generation and assistance. CodeGemma is now available through Vertex AI.

Image Credits: Frederic Lardinois/TechCrunch

Cloud Assist

In addition to Code Assist, Google also today announced Gemini Cloud Assist to help “cloud teams design, operate, and optimize their application lifecycle.” The tool can generate architecture configuration that are tailored to a company’s needs, for example, based on a description of the desired design outcome. It can also help diagnose issues and find their root causes, as well as optimize a company’s cloud usage to reduce cost or improve performance.

Cloud Assist will be available through a chat interface and embedded directly into a number of Google Cloud products.

Google brings Stack Overflow’s knowledge base to Gemini for Google Cloud

GitHub’s Copilot Enterprise is now generally available at $39 a month

Amazon launches CodeWhisperer, a GitHub Copilot-like AI pair programming tool


Software Development in Sri Lanka

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