Google’s cofounder tells AI staff to stop ‘building nanny products’
Sergey Brin. | Image: Getty Images / The VergeFor the last couple years, it has been evident that Google cofounder Sergey Brin is back in the building. This week, he sent a clear message to hundreds of employees in Googleas DeepMind AI division, known as GDM: the pressure to win the AGI race is on.
aIt has been 2 years of the Gemini program and GDM,a begins his note, which The New York Times first reported on yesterday and Iam publishing below in full. aWe 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.a
Brin goes on to recommend that Googleas AI teams work longer hours (a60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivitya), come into the office aat least every week day,a prioritize asimple solutionsa to problems, and generally move faster (acan't wait 20 minutes to run a bit of pythona). What stuck out the most to me was his last point: that Googleas AI products aare overrun with filters and punts of various kinds.a According to Brin, Google needs to atrust ou …