Google’s co-founder tells AI staff to stop ‘building nanny products’

For the last couple years, it has been evident that Google co-founder Sergey Brin is back in the building. This week, he sent a clear message to hundreds of employees in Google’s DeepMind AI division, known as GDM: the pressure to win the AGI race is on.

“It has been 2 years of the Gemini program and GDM,” begins his note, which The New York Times first reported on yesterday and I’m publishing below in full. “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 goes on to recommend that Google’s AI teams work longer hours (“60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity”), come into the office “at least every week day,” prioritize “simple solutions” to problems, and generally move faster (“can’t wait 20 minutes to run a bit of python”). What stuck out the most to me was his last point: that Google’s AI products “are overrun with filters and punts of various kinds.” According to Brin, Google needs to “trust o …

Read the full story at The Verge.