What is Google Pitchfork?

That is teaching artificial intelligence to write and fix code

Google’s “Secretive New” Coding Project

Hey Everyone,

While GitHub Copilot and now GitHub Copilot for business is fairly straight forward with what it’s promising and doing, Google’s Generative A.I. Division is a bit more secretive. Around a month ago Insider wrote this article that trended on Reddit here.

Is this clickbait or are they on to something? If Reddit is full of clickbait news, it’s hard sometimes to tell what’s going on. Sundar loves to talk about A.I. as “the new fire”, but with ChatGPT demo and Microsoft’s involvement could Google’s search moat be under threat?

This is question I’m sure many of us will ponder in 2023.

The future of Generative A.I’s impact on coding and software engineering productivity is perhaps even more interesting to the future of technology. It’s really an engineering heavy culture.

Photo by Christopher Gower on Unsplash

Google is working on a secret project that aims to teach artificial intelligence how to write, fix and update code using machine learning.

Microsoft and Amazon are as well.

The Coding “Pitchfork” Upgraded in 2023?

This project is part of a broader push by Google into so-called generative artificial intelligence, which uses algorithms to create images, videos, code, and more.

According to the Insider report, it could have profound implications for the company's future and developers who write code.

Alphabet’s X Research Unit

The project, which began life inside Alphabet's X research unit and was codenamed Pitchfork, moved into Google's Labs group this summer, according to people familiar with the matter. By moving into Google, it signaled its increased importance to leaders. Google Labs pursues long-term bets, including projects in virtual and augmented reality.

An AI Developer Assistance Team led by Olivia Hatalsky, who previously worked on many of the company's other projects, including Google Glass, is now working on the project.

Considering Microsoft’s integration with OpenAI and GitHub, how does Google compete with GitHub Copilot here?

Google needs to keep innovating: As you might remember in 2018, (Decoder) Google put artificial intelligence at the center of its operations and even renamed its research department into Google AI. Since then, more and more AI applications are finding their way into Google products, such as the Pixel smartphones.

Now in the Generative A.I. era, it’s not clear exactly what it will do but more will become clear in 2023. Google needs to address both ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, but it’s not clear how it plans to do this.

A LaMDA chatbot in Chrome or tied to Google’s search engine makes sense as Conversational A.I. gets a likely push in 2023 with GPT-4 among other things.

Will Code Generation and Auto-complete be meaningful?

According to some with GitHub Copilot, it already is:

Andrej Karpathy @karpathy

Nice read on reverse engineering of GitHub Copilot 🪄. Copilot has dramatically accelerated my coding, it's hard to imagine going back to "manual coding". Still learning to use it but it already writes ~80% of my code, ~80% accuracy. I don't even really code, I prompt. & edit.

Parth Thakkar @parth007_96

A while back I'd done some shallow reverse engineering of Copilot Now I've done a deeper dive into Copilot's internals, built a tool to explore its code, and wrote a blog answering specific questions and pointing out some tidbits. https://t.co/nX5ilC4ou5 Do read, might be fun! https://t.co/DgPl3fjo97

When Andrej’s former boss is head of Twitter and was a co-founder of OpenAI, it’s hard to tell how serious he is being on the above Twitter post. You could speculate he would even get paid to make such statements by Microsoft.

It is sometimes assumed that the created algorithm will be able to learn programming styles and independently write code based on what has been learned. Initially, Google’s project was faced with the task of creating a tool that could update the code base of the Python programming language to new versions without involving live programmers. Over time, the goals of the project shifted towards creating a general purpose system that could reduce the need for people to write and update code while maintaining its quality. It is not yet known at what stage the development of the Google code generator is.

Is the Automation of Coding on the Way in 2023?

To save on software engineers is to save a lot of money for enterprises and potentially Google Cloud customers. So it’s all related.

Cloud leaders like Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud and others are in a race for Generative A.I. for more reasons than appears in the ChatGPT hype you might find on the internet today.

If BigTech and the likes of ByteDance harness Generative A.I. won’t their moats and revenue stream advantages become even more meaningful and anti-competitive? According to Capitalism and the laws of innovation, who cares! But when does it stack into a major problem for the global economy?