The Ledger
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Brin is a skeptic of humanoid robots despite industry hype
“I'm probably the one weirdo who doesn't, who's not a big fan of humanoids, but maybe I'm jaded because we've, you know, we at least acquired at least two humanoid robotic startups and later sold them. But the reason is, I mean, the reason people want to do hum…”
Brin claims management is the easiest business function to automate with AI
“Management is like the easiest thing to do with AI.”
Sergey Brin: Google Cloud turns away customers due to compute shortages
“For us, we're kind of building out compute as quickly as we can, and we just have a huge amount of demand. I mean, for example, our cloud customers just want a huge amount of TPUs, GPUs, you name it. You know, we just can't, we have to turn down customers beca…”
Brin: Google internal policy briefly banned engineers from using Gemini
“Okay, I, like recently, I just had a big tiff inside the company, because we have this list of what you're allowed to use to code, and what you're not allowed to use to code, and Gemini was on the null list.”
Brin: Specialized AI learnings inevitably get merged into general foundation models
“We are generally able to, after we do that, take those learnings and basically put that capability into a general model. So there's not that much benefit. You know, you could, you can get away with a somewhat smaller specialized model, a little bit faster, a l…”
Brin admits DeepSeek's release closed the gap with proprietary AI models
“Deep Seek released a really surprisingly powerful model when it was January or so. So that, that definitely closed the gap to proprietary models.”
Brin: I rely on AI for math and coding over my skills
“With my skill of math and coding, I feel like I'm better off just turning to the AI now.”
Sergey Brin: Google engineers underutilize AI tools for their own coding
“They don't honestly use the AI tools for their own coding as much as I think they ought to.”
Sergey Brin: AI development is trending toward unified, shared architectures
“But I do think the trend is to have a more unified model. I don't know if I'd call it a god model. But to have certainly sort of shared architectures and ultimately even shared models.”
Sergey Brin: AI algorithmic improvements may be outpacing compute scaling
“The algorithmic improvements that have come over the course of the last few years, ah, maybe are actually even outpacing the increased compute that's put into these models.”
Sergey Brin admits Google was 'too timid' to deploy language models
“We were too timid to deploy them”
Sergey Brin: AI technology should not be hidden until perfect
“I just don't think this is the technology you want to just kind of keep close to the chest and hidden until it's like perfect.”
Sergey Brin: AI is the most exciting technology of my lifetime
“Being a computer scientist, it is, you know, the most exciting thing, you know, of my life, just technologically.”
Brin: Post-training and thinking models are a huge, uncapped step forward
“And more recently, the post-training, especially as the thinking models have come around. And that's been, you know, another huge step up in general in AI. So you know, we don't really know what the ceiling is.”
Brin: Google is internally testing third-party AI coding tools like Cursor
“No, we're trying to, you know, roll out every possible kind of AI and trying external ones, you know, be whatever the cursors of the world, all, all of those to just see what really makes people more productive.”
Brin admits the technology was simply not ready for Google Glass
“There are a bunch of things I wish I had done differently, but honestly, it was just like the technology wasn't ready for Google Glass.”
Brin: Google mostly uses custom TPUs over GPUs for Gemini
“Well, we mostly, for Gemini, we mostly use our own TPUs.”
Brin: Google's newest, most computationally expensive AI models won't be free
“I don't think we're gonna like necessarily our latest and greatest models, which are, you know, take a lot of computation. I don't think we're gonna just be free to everybody right off the bat.”
Sergey Brin confirms he works at Google 'pretty much every day'
“Honestly, like, pretty much every day.”
Sergey Brin: Language-model robotics are impressive but lack day-to-day robustness
“Robotics, For the most part, I see in this sort of wow stage, like wow, you could make a robot do that with just, you know, this general purpose language model, or just a little bit of fine tuning this way or that, and it's like amazing but maybe not for the m…”
Sergey Brin: Pre-multimodal robotics efforts feel 'silly' in hindsight
“It, yeah, it just feels kind of silly having done all of that work and seeing now how capable these general language models are that include, for example, vision and image, and they're multimodal, and they can understand The scene and everything, and not havin…”
Sergey Brin: Moving 90% accurate AI demos to production requires massive effort
“It does it correctly, like, 90% of the time, but am I really, like, is that then worth it if 10% of the time it's gonna make a mistake or taking too long or whatever? And then you have to work, work, work, work, work, work, work to get to perfect all those thi…”
Sergey Brin admits Google was 'quite a ways behind' when ChatGPT launched
“We've come a long way since you know, a couple whatever years ago when ChatGPT launched and we were quite a ways behind.”
Brin: AI advances so fast that monthly progress is noticeable
“These AI systems actually change quite a lot, you know, the, like, if you went away somewhere for a month and you came back, you'd be like, whoa, what happened?”
Sergey Brin: AI models can win math and coding contests against top humans
“Like, they, you know, can win, like, math contests and coding contests, things like that against, you know, some top humans.”
Brin: Google sold robotics startups because AI software lagged behind hardware
“I mean, I think we've you know, acquired and later sold like five or so robotics companies and you know, Boston being one of them. I guess if I look back on it, we built the hardware. We also had this more recently. We built out everyday robotics internally, a…”
Brin: Open-plan offices make AI voice mode hard to use at work
“During work, I can't really use voice mode too much. I usually use it on the drive.”
Brin: Google's free AI tiers typically match the previous generation's pro tier
“Every time we've gone forward a generation, then the sort of the new free tier is usually as good as the previous pro tier and sometimes better.”
Sergey Brin: Rapid base AI progress makes long-term product forecasting difficult
“It's, like, just really hard To, you know, just forecast, like, you know, to think five years out, because, you know, based on the base technical capability of the AI is what enables the applications and then sometimes, you know, somebody will just whip up a l…”
Brin says returning code contributions were just minor access-related changelists
“The code I submitted wasn't very exciting. I think I needed to, like, add myself to get access to some things and, you know, a minor CL here or there.”