Spotify has shared that the best developers at the digital music service "have not written a single line of code since December", leaving it all to artificial intelligence.
The statement came from Spotify co-CEO Gustav Soderstrom during its fourth-quarter earnings call and highlighted how it is using AI to accelerate development, TechCrunch reported.
This comes days after the Swedish music streaming giant saw its user numbers reach new highs during the last quarter, majorly driven by the year-end "Wrapped" campaign.
Spotify witnessed a record-breaking 38 million new users in the fourth quarter. This took its total number of monthly active users to 751 million users, up by 11% from a year earlier. In the quarter, paying subscribers jumped by 10% and reached 290 million. Overall, the "Wrapped" campaign resulted in over 300 million engaged users along with 630 million shares on social media in 56 languages.
During its fourth-quarter earnings call, Spotify noted that it shipped over 50 new features and changes to the app throughout the last year. In the past few weeks, it rolled out several new features, such as Page Match for audiobooks, AI-powered Prompted Playlists, and About This Song.
The company informed analysts that its engineers were using an internal system, named 'Honk,' to speed up coding and product velocity. Under this, they are able to perform various talks like remote and real-time code deployment using generative AI.
"As a concrete example, an engineer at Spotify on their morning commute from Slack on their cell phone can tell Claude to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app. And once Claude finishes that work, the engineer then gets a new version of the app, pushed to them on Slack on their phone, so that he can then merge it to production, all before they even arrive at the office," TechCrunch quoted Soderstrom as saying.
The company said the system was helping them "tremendously" in speeding up coding and deployment. Soderstrom even pointed out that they foresee this "not being the end of the line in terms of AI development, just the beginning".
On Tuesday, Spotify reported quarterly revenue of €4.53 billion (or $5.39 billion) as well as earnings per share of €4.43 ($5.27). It has managed to beat Wall Street's estimates of €4.52 billion ($5.38 billion) and €2.75 EPS ($3.27), as per FactSet.
Soderstrom has even highlighted the company's ability to come up with a unique dataset that other LLMs could not commoditise.
Soderstrom stated that they are working on a dataset right now that "no one else is really building."
"It does not exist at this scale. And we see it improving every time we retrain our models," Söderström added.
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