After it was perceived to have been lagging in the AI race to upstarts like OpenAI and Anthropic, Google seems to have gotten all hands on deck — and those hands include those of the company’s original founders.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin has made a rare appearance in Google’s promotional vide for Antigravity, its AI-agent led IDE. Google had launched Antigravity yesterday in a bid to compete with Cursor and other AI-first coding IDEs, and had even offered a free plan as opposed to the $20-$40 that other companies charge per month.
And Antigravity’s launch video had an unexpected face. In the video shared by Varun Mohan, who joined Google after its acquisition of Windsurf, a laptop is seen floating in the air. The screen then glitches, and goes into what’s presumably a flashback. It shows Varun Mohan typing away at the laptop, while his teammates stand behind him. To his right is Sergey Brin, who stares into the screen with the rest of team. He then taps Mohan approvingly on his back and smiles. Mohan then shuts down the laptop, and the team walks away. The camera focuses on the laptop as dramatic music builds, and the laptop then starts floating. The video conveys how Antigravity, the IDE developed by the team would make coding much easier than before.
The most striking part about the video, though, is the appearance of Sergey Brin. Brin had co-founded Google in 1998, and had become the President of Alphabet when Sundar Pichai had taken over as CEO in 2015. Seeing how Google seemed to be in able hands, he’d stepped down as President in 2019, and was believed to have been enjoying his retirement as one of the richest men in the world.
The AI revolution, however, changed all that. When ChatGPT was launched in late 2022, it had been reported that Brin had returned, and had even begun submitting code. In May this year, Google CEO Sundar Pichai had confirmed Brin was back in a big way. “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,” Pichai had said.
It now seems that Brin was also heavily involved in the development of the Antigravity IDE. Not only has he made a rare appearance in its launch video, he’s also seen patting the backs of the team that developed it, indicating that he’s happy with the way the product has turned out. It remains to be seen how Antigravity fares against competition, but it seems to have been made with the active involvement and backing of one of Google’s founders.