Jeffrey Dastin/REUTERS
Google cofounder Sergey Brin says now is the time for retired computer scientists to dust off their keyboards.
Six years after leaving Alphabet in 2019, Brin is back working on its most ambitious projects. Reports of Brin helping out at Google began to emerge sometime in 2023 after OpenAI rocked the tech industry with ChatGPT’s release in 2022. It’s clear that Brin is no longer a retired computer scientist.
And you shouldn’t be either, Brin told “Big Technology’s” Alex Kantrowitz during a live interview onstage at Google’s IO developer conference on Tuesday.
“Honestly, anybody who’s a computer scientist should not be retired right now,” Brin said alongside Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis.
DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet, is the research lab behind the company’s AI projects, including its genAI assistant Gemini. Brin told Kantrowitz that he’s at Google “pretty much every day now” to help with training the latest models from Gemini.
With artificial intelligence becoming an increasingly competitive and near-constantly changing tech field, it’s a “very unique time in history,” according to Brin. When Kantrowitz asked if his return was solely about competing with rivals who are working toward their own artificial general intelligence systems, Brin said it’s not just about the AI arms race.
“There’s just never been a greater, sort of, problem and opportunity — greater cusp of technology,” he responded.
Google DeepMind did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for additional comments from Brin.
Having witnessed tech advancements like the earliest iteration of the internet, Web 1.0, and the phases that followed, Brin said Tuesday AI is “far more exciting” to be immersed in and will have a greater impact on the world.
However the race to reach AGI, a tech milestone of machine intelligence that can solve human tasks, is still on his mind.
“We fully intend that Gemini will be the very first AGI,” Brin said.
His retirement included working an airship startup, LTA Research, funding research for Parkinson’s, and investing in real estate.
The former Alphabet president led moonshot projects as the head of Google X before his departure in 2019. He notably worked on its failed attempt at smart glasses — Google Glass.
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