Google Co-Founder Pushes AI Team to Work 60-Hour Weeks
Google’s co-founder has reportedly urged the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) teams to “turbocharge” their work.
Sergey Brin, who stepped down as Google’s president in 2019 but retains a seat on the board, says that means coming into the office “at least every week day,” working 60-hour weeks, and moving faster, The Verge reported Saturday (March 1), citing an internal memo.
“It has been 2 years of the Gemini program and GDM [Google DeepMind],” Brin wrote.
“We have come a long way in that time with many efforts we should feel very proud of. At the same time competition has accelerated immensely and the final race to AGI is afoot,” he wrote, in reference to artificial general intelligence, a form of AI that can perform at or above the level of humans.
“I think we have all the ingredients to win this race but we are going to have to turbocharge our efforts,” Brin added.
The memo also called on AI workers stop “building nanny products” and “trust our users” more, with Brin arguing that the company’s AI offerings were “overrun with filters and punts of various kinds.”
Brin’s memo echoes comments from late last year by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who told employees that “the stakes are high” for the company this year.
“I think 2025 will be critical,” Pichai said, per audio obtained by CNBC. “I think it’s really important we internalize the urgency of this moment, and need to move faster as a company. The stakes are high. These are disruptive moments. In 2025, we need to be relentlessly focused on unlocking the benefits of this technology and solve real user problems.”
In related news, PYMNTS spoke last week with Risto Uuk, head of EU policy and research at the Future of Life Institute, about efforts by Google and other tech giants to push back against Europe’s AI regulations.
“Certain big technology companies are coming out saying they either will not sign this code of practice unless it is changed according to what they want,” Uuk said.
As that report noted, the Future of Life Institute is perhaps best known in AI circles as the organization that circulated an open letter in 2023 advocating a six-month moratorium on advanced AI models until safety protocols were established. That letter, Uuk said, did not have the desired effect.
“Many of these companies have not increased their safety work, which the ‘pause’ letter called for,” he added. “The pause was not just for the sake of pausing, but you would use it to increase AI safety work, and this work, arguably, in many cases, has not happened.”
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