Sergey Brin co-founded Google in the 1990s with Larry Page, but stepped down from the company in 2019 — however, the AI boom forced the businessman to return to the office, and now he believes that other employees should follow suit.
In Silicon Valley, only the lazy don’t talk about AGI — strong or general artificial intelligence that can successfully perform any intellectual task available to humans — and Brin is no exception. According to the businessman, it is Google that has a winning position and opportunities to create it, but it will have to change its working conditions somewhat.
In an internal memo reviewed by The New York Times, Breen advises Google employees to attend the office daily and work at least 60 hours a week (12 hours per working day from Monday to Friday) — because this is the «performance point» that the businessman believes can put the search giant ahead in the race for strong AI.
«The competition has increased tremendously and the last race for AGI has begun,» Brin wrote. «I think we have all the ingredients to win this race, but we’re going to have to step up our efforts».
Brin and his colleague handed over the reins to current CEO Sundar Pichai in 2015, so his statement does not necessarily mean a change in the company’s current remote and office work policy. However, Sergey’s voice as the founder carries a lot of weight — although Google clarified that the work schedule has not been updated and no such plans are being considered.
«Some people work less than 60 hours, and a certain proportion spend the minimum to get by. This latter group is not only unproductive, but can be very demoralizing for everyone else,» Breen concluded in his address.
As noted by ArstechnicaInitially, Google was the company that laid the foundation for what modern generative AI bots are built on, although it didn’t realize it until OpenAI did not start adding the first «bricks» to it. In 2017, Google researchers published an article «Attention Is All You Need» about the Transformer architecture, which still supports large language models, but in 2022, when ChatGPT was released, the company was only a failure with the disorderly launch of the Bard AI chatbot. After this fiasco, Google corrected its reputation Gemini AI and started spending a lot of money on building data centers for artificial intelligence. The creation of AGI is one of the main desires of the search giant, as it is for many companies.
Brin is not the only one who believes that AGI is quite achievable — OpenAI chairman Sam Altman stated that his company’s general artificial intelligence is a couple of years away. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, on the other hand, has a slightly different view of the technology’s development, and in a recent interview, he said that general artificial intelligence is simply «meaningless test case hacking», whereas AI technology itself in its current form «does not generate any value».
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