Why Did Sergey Brin Return to Google?

Kevin Roose says Sergey Brin returned to Google after retiring in 2019 because an OpenAI researcher shamed him at a party for sitting out AI. Brin had planned to spend his days on a yacht reading science papers. Roose is not sure how many years that lasted, only that it was at least a few, and Brin was still in semi-retirement. At the party the researcher asked why one of the seven or eight richest people in the world was on the sidelines while AI, the dream of computer science, was happening.

Brin got competitive. In Roose's account, he asked why Google was behind, called the lead Google's birthright, and treated Google as the first AGI company because it invented the transformer. He came back in a role that is not technically an executive and set up a desk with the Gemini team. He started coding, making commits, and filing bug reports on Gemini training runs.

The return was divisive. A billionaire boss showed up after years away, told people how to train models, and sent a memo whose gist was that everyone had gotten complacent and should work harder, on the order of 60 hours a week. People asked what he had been doing for the last five years. Roose does not think Brin was necessarily wrong. He credits that pressure, and a push to drop the chill workday, with a large part of Google trying to catch OpenAI and Anthropic.