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Journalism of Courage
Google co-founder Sergey Brin has recommended that employees at the tech giant’s DeepMind AI division put in 12-hour workdays as the race to artificial general intelligence (AGI) intensifies.
“In my experience about 60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity. Some folks put in a lot more but can burn out or lose creativity. A number of folks work less than 60 hours and a small number put in the bare minimum to get by. This last group is not only unproductive but also can be highly demoralizing to everyone else,” Brin said in an internal memo shared with employees, according to a report by The New York Times.
The note came as Google DeepMind (known as GDM) and its Gemini AI programme completes two years. “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. I think we have all the ingredients to win this race but we are going to have to turbocharge our efforts,” Brin was quoted as saying.
Brin’s full memo, published by The Verge, also stressed the importance of working out of Google offices “because physically being together is far more effective for communication than gve etc.” “I recommend being in the office at least every week day,” the former president of Google parent company Alphabet said.
“We need our products, models, internal tools to be fast. Can’t wait 20 minutes to run a bit of python on borg,” Brin further said, adding that Google needs “real wins that scale.”
Surprisingly, the note came from Brin and not Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis, who heads Google DeepMind. Brin no longer has a formal role at Google. He and co-founder Larry Page stepped down from their positions at Alphabet in 2019 and went into retirement. However, he is still a board member.
In his memo, Brin also came out against “building nanny products” in what appears to be a push for removing guardrails built into Google’s AI products. “Our products are overrun with filters and punts of various kinds. We need capable products and [to] trust our users,” he said.
Brin was one of the many prominent Silicon Valley leaders who attended the inauguration of US President Donald Trump. The gathering also included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, among others.
