It's time to bring out the big guns.
As tech companies battle for supremacy in the AI arena, it looks like a certain internet heavyweight is stepping back into the ring.
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We're talking about Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google (GOOGL) -), who resigned as president Google's parent company, Alphabet, in 2019, while co-founder Larry Page stepped down as CEO.
"We’ve never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there’s a better way to run the company," the two men wrote at the time. "And Alphabet and Google no longer need two CEOs and a President."
Maybe not, but Brin has reportedly been visiting the tech giant’s Mountain View, Calif., offices in recent months generally three to four days a week, working alongside researchers as they push to develop the company’s next large artificial-intelligence system.
Brin participated in meetings about AI at Google’s offices late last year, the Wall Street Journal reported, but the frequency and intensity of his involvement has picked up.
Discussing New AI Research
He has worked closely with a group of researchers building Google’s AI model Gemini.
They have discussed technical matters such as “loss curves,” a way of measuring an AI program’s performance over time, and Brin has convened weekly discussions of new AI research with Google employees.
He also has intervened in personnel matters, such as the hiring of sought-after researchers, the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
Brin has spent much of his time sitting alongside Mountain View-based AI researchers at the newly constructed Charleston East building, a short walk from the original heart of Google’s corporate campus.
Sundar Pichai, chief executive of both Google and Alphabet, also has an office in the building, and is reportedly excited about Brin’s involvement and has encouraged his contributions.
Competition is intensifying in AI research, with recent new offerings from Facebook parent Meta Platforms (META) -) and others.
'Power and Potential' of AI
Google sped up product development in response to last year’s release of ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that can respond fluently to a range of written queries, by the research company OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft (MSFT) -).
Google had a head start on artificial intelligence, forming a research unit in 2011 called Brain to investigate how a computing technique called deep learning could be used to build widely useful AI programs.
Pichai merged the Brain team this year with DeepMind, an AI research company that previously operated independently under the Alphabet umbrella
Brin, 49, is Alphabet’s second-largest individual shareholder behind Page, with a stake valued at close to $90 billion, according to S&P Capital IQ data.
He started Google Page in 1998 based on web search research they worked on together as Stanford University doctoral students.
Brin promoted the possibilities of AI in his last shareholder letter, issued in 2018, writing that the “power and potential and potential of computation to tackle important problems has never been greater.”
Alphabet did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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