AI is threatening to take away many jobs, but it’s bringing some people back to them too.
Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, recently revealed the driving force behind his return to the tech giant: the rapid advancements in AI. Google CEO Sundar Pichai had said last week that Brin was back at work at Google, and was even sitting and coding with Gemini engineers.
Brin revealed that his return was quite sudden, and that it had been quite fun. He said, “It’s been some of the most fun I’ve had in my life, honestly,” Brin said at an All In event in Miami.
He explains that his retirement was a fleeting moment, cut short by global events and technological momentum. “I retired a month before COVID hit. I thought, ‘That’s been good. I want to do something else. I want to hang out in cafes and read physics books.’ And then a month later, I was like, ‘That’s not really happening.’ So then I just started to go to the office, once we could go to the office.”
A chance encounter further solidified his return. “To be perfectly honest, there was a guy from OpenAI, this guy named Dan, and I ran into him at a little party. He said, ‘Look, what are you doing? This is the greatest transformative moment in computer science ever! And he told me this, and I had already started kind of going into the office a little bit.”
Brin admits that he was convinced, adding: “I was like, ‘He’s right.’ And it has been just incredible. Just, well, you guys all obviously follow all of the AI technology, but being a computer scientist, it is the most exciting thing of my life. Just technology.”
Brin’s return underscores the magnetic pull of AI on even those who have seemingly stepped away from the daily grind. His perspective frames the current advancements as a pivotal moment, suggesting we are on the cusp of changes so fundamental they redefine the field itself. Brin wasn’t just intrigued — he felt compelled to be part of it.
And having a founder back in the trenches would do wonders for the morale at Google. Google had been caught napping in the AI race when OpenAI had released ChatGPT in November 2022, but has largely regained its lead in recent times. Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro model is leading on most benchmarks, and its latest video generation model, Veo3, is miles ahead of all competition. Google has been creating some interesting AI products as well, including NotebookLM, which has been making a splash in the app charts. And the fact that billionaires like Sergey Brin are now back at work shows that AI is not just a trend — it’s a gravitational force pulling talent and investment back into the tech sector.