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Google co-founder Sergey Brin made an unannounced appearance on stage at the I/O conference on Tuesday, stating that he’s in the company’s office “pretty much every day now” to work on Gemini. In a chat with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, he claimed this is because artificial intelligence is something that naturally interests him.
“I tend to be pretty deep in the technical details,” Brin said, according to Business Insider. “And that’s a luxury I really enjoy, fortunately, because guys like Demis are minding the shop. And that’s just where my scientific interest is.”
More ‘aggressive performance management’ within competitive tech space
After co-founding the company in 1998, Brin stepped back from day-to-day operations at Google in 2019 but re-engaged with the company in 2023 to focus more actively on AI initiatives. Though he cites this passion as his reason for going into the office, it might raise eyebrows if he didn’t. Back in February, Brin urged employees working on Gemini AI tools to be in the office “at least every weekday” and said they should be clocking 60-hour weeks.
Since OpenAI’s ChatGPT entered the public consciousness at the end of 2022, tech companies have been competing for dominance in the competitive AI sector, so leaders have turned up the pressure internally. “There is more pressure for individuals to be better in their roles, and there is much more aggressive performance management happening these days,” a longtime Google manager told Business Insider in January.
Another major contributor to the increasingly pressured workplace culture is the political climate. Elon Musk, who famously gutted Twitter of over 6,000 staff when he bought the site and rebranded it as X, has become the poster child for ruling with fear over incentives. Despite the drastic cuts, X remains operational, and Musk has been in a position of huge influence within the Trump administration as a senior adviser assisting in the operations of the Department of Government Efficiency.
One anonymous Google employee told Business Insider in March that Musk’s success with the cutthroat management style “gives them the green light to do it openly” and that they’re now “being asked to do more for less.”
Google Glass failed due to Brin’s lack of knowledge
Brin was asked about the now-infamous Google Glass, the company’s early attempt at consumer augmented reality eyewear. The product was discontinued in 2015 amid widespread privacy concerns and negative public reception, which led to bans in various settings.
The executive was a champion of Google Glass, predicting back in 2013 that using a smartphone would be “emasculating” in comparison to wearing the specs in the future. He emceed the first live demo of Google Glass being used by skydivers at the 2012 I/O conference.
On stage at this year’s I/O, Brin said that Google Glass’s failure stemmed from his own lack of knowledge. “I just didn’t know anything about consumer electronic supply chains, really, and how hard it would be to build that and have it at a reasonable price point,” he said, according to Business Insider.
Earlier at the conference, Google introduced its new iteration of AI-powered smart glasses built on its extended reality platform, Android XR, in collaboration with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. Brin said he believes AI is now advanced enough to power such a wearable, according to Business Insider.