The Google founders had largely stepped away from their day-to-day roles when they’d handed over the reins of the company to Sundar Pichai, but the AI revolution appears to have brought them right back into the thick of things.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said that Google co-founder Sergey Brin is actively coding its AI product Gemini along with other Google engineers. “I’m fortunate to have both of them deeply involved in their own unique ways, deeply. I talk to them all the time,” Pichai said.
“Both Larry and Sergey — credit to them — have always envisioned where AI would be. I think they’re ability to understand trends… I swear I’ve had conversations maybe as early as 15-20 years ago about moments like (the current state of AI) with them. I think they both would argue that this is the most exciting time in the field,” he added.
“And they both engage in their own ways. I think Sergey is definitely spending time with the Gemini team in a pretty hardcore way, setting and coding and spending time with the engineers. And that gives the energy to the team which I think it’s unparalleled, right? Like to have a founder sitting there looking at loss curves, giving feedback on model architectures, how can we improve post-training, etc. I think it’s a rare place to be.”
This isn’t the first time that Sergey Brin has been known to be back in a big way at Google since the recent AI revolution. It had earlier been reported that he’d begun submitting code at Google after spending years away from the company. Brin isn’t the only founder who’s returned to his company with the advent of AI — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos too has reportedly been working on AI initiatives within the company, years after having given the CEO title to Andy Jassy. And it’s perhaps this desire to make a different that makes these founders so successful in the first place — even after being some of the richest people in the world, when a monumental change has taken place in the world of tech, they’ve rolled up their sleeves and got back to work at the companies they founded.