Sergey Brin
Appearances
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
No, we're trying to roll out every possible kind of AI and trying external ones, whatever the cursors of the world, all of those, to just see what really makes people more productive. I mean, for myself, it definitely makes me more productive because I'm not coding.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
We'll get there. Technically on leave of absence. Right. And he told me this, and I'd already started kind of going into the office a little bit, and I was like, you know, he's right. And it has been just incredible. Well, you guys all obviously follow all the AI technology, but being a computer scientist, it is the most exciting thing of my life, just technologically. Yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
That's a great question. I mean, look, I don't know. You guys can take a guess just as well as I can. But if I had to guess, things have been more converging. And this is sort of broadly true across machine learning. I mean, you used to have all kinds of different kinds of models and whatever, convolutional networks for vision things. And you had whatever RNNs for text and speech and stuff.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
And all of this has shifted to transformers, basically. Yeah. And increasingly, it's also just becoming one model. Now, we do get a lot of oomph occasionally. We do specialized models. And it's definitely scientifically a good way to iterate when you have a particular target. You don't have to do everything in every language and handle whatever, both images and video and audio in one go.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
But 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 can get away with a somewhat smaller specialized model, a little bit faster, a little bit cheaper, but the trends have not gone that way.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
I have to give credit to where credit's due. DeepSeek released a really surprisingly powerful model when it was January or so. That definitely closed the gap to proprietary models. We've pursued both, so we released Gemma which are our open source or open to wait models. And those perform really well. They're small, dense models, so they fit well on one computer. And
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
They're not as powerful as Gemini. But I mean, the jury's out which way that's going to go.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
Yeah, I kind of messed that up, I'll be honest. Got the timing totally wrong on that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
Yeah. Right, right, but early. 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 Class. But nowadays, these things I think are more sensible. I mean, there's still battery life issues, I think, that we and others need to overcome. But I think that's a cool form factor.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
I mean, when you say 10 years, though, a lot of people are saying, hey, the singularity is like five years away. So your ability to see through that into the future, I mean, it's very hard.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
Boy, I think sometimes us nerdy guys go and have a little too much wine and chitter chat.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
I'm ready to go. I need just more for this conversation. Human implants, let's go. I mean, I guess we're starting to get experience with these AIs that can do certain things much better than us. And they're definitely, with my skill of math and coding, I feel like I'm better off just turning to the AI now, and how do I feel about that? I mean, it doesn't really bother me. I use it as a tool.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
So I feel like I've gotten used to it. But maybe if they get even more capable in the future... I'll look at it differently.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
I guess so. As an aside, management is like the easiest thing to do with AI. Yeah, absolutely. And I did this at Gemini on some of our work chats, kind of like Slack, but we have our own version. We had this AI tool that actually was really powerful. We unfortunately, anyway, temporarily got rid of it. I think we're going to bring it back and bring it to everybody.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
But it could suck down a whole chat space and then answer pretty complicated questions. So I was like, okay, summarize this for me. Okay, now assign something for everyone to work on. And then I would paste it back in so people didn't realize it was the AI. I admitted that pretty soon. And there were a few giveaways here or there. But it worked remarkably well.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
And then I was like, well, who should be promoted in this chat space? Yeah. And it actually picked out this woman, this young woman engineer who like, you know, I didn't even notice she wasn't very vocal particularly in that group. But her PRs kicked ass.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
No, no, it was like, and then, I don't know, something that the AI had detected and I went and I talked to the manager actually and he was like, yeah, you know what, you're right. Like, she's been working really hard, did all these things. Wow. I think that ended up happening actually. So, I don't know, I guess after a while you just kind of take it for granted that you can just do these things.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
I don't know, it hasn't really... Do you think that there's a use case for an infinite context link? Oh, 100%. All of Google's code base goes in one day.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
Yeah, I mean, I guess if it knows everything, then you can have just one in theory. You just need to somehow tell it what you're talking about. But yeah, for sure, there's no limit to use of context, and there are a lot of ways to make it larger and larger.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
I mean, for any such cool new idea in AI, there are probably five such things internally. And the question is, how well do they work? And yeah, I mean, we're definitely pushing all the bounds in terms of intelligence, in terms of context, in terms of... you name it. And what about the hardware?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
Well, we mostly, for Gemini, we mostly use our own TPUs. But we also do support NVIDIA and we were one of the big purchasers of NVIDIA chips and we have them in Google Cloud available for our customers in addition to TPUs. At this stage, it's, for better or for worse, not that abstract. And maybe someday the AI will abstract it for us.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
But given just the amount of computation you have to do on these models, you actually have to think pretty carefully how to do everything and exactly what kind of chip you have and how the memory works and the communication works and so forth are actually pretty big factors. And it actually, yeah, maybe one of these days the AI itself will be good enough to reason through that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
Today it's not quite good enough.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
Yeah, I mean, the excitement of the early web, like I remember using Mosaic and then later Netscape. How many of you remember... Mosaic, actually, my weirdo. And you remember there was a What's New page.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
Everything is getting better and faster. Smaller models are more capable. There are better ways to do inference on them that are faster.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
All models tend to do better if you threaten them. If you threaten them. Like with physical violence. Yes. Management is like the easiest thing to do with AI. Absolutely.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
It's a funny thing, but we have the big open shared offices. So during work, I can't really use voice mode too much. I usually use it on the drive. The drive is incredible.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
I don't feel like I could. I mean, I would get its output in my headphones, but if I want to speak to it, then everybody's listening to me. I just think that would be socially awkward. But I should do that. In my car ride, I do chat to the AI. But then it's like audio in, audio out. But I feel like, honestly, maybe it's a good argument for a private office.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
I should spend more time like you guys are.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
They might get you one. I like being out in the bullpen, so to speak. I like being with everybody. But I do think that there's this AI use case that I'm missing. I should probably figure out how to Try more often. If people want to try your new product, is there a website they can visit?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
And you should use 2.5 Pro. 2.5 Pro. You've got to pay, right? Yeah, you get a few prompts for free, but if you do it a bunch, you need to pay. It's like 20 bucks a month.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
Okay, it's free today without ads on the side. You just get a certain number of the top model. I think we likely are going to have always now top models that we can't supply infinitely to everyone right off the bat. But... wait three months and then the next generation.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
Like you go to the homepage. Two or three new webpages. Yeah, it was like this last week, these were the new websites. Yes. And it was like such and such elementary school, such and such a fish tank. Yeah. And you were like, wow.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
I'm all for really good AI advertising. I don't think we're going to necessarily, our latest and greatest models, which take a lot of computation, I don't think we're going to just be free to everybody right off the bat.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
But as we go to the next generation, it's like every time we've gone forward a generation, then the new free tier is usually as good as the previous pro tier, and sometimes better. All right, give it up for Sergey Brin. Thank you.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
Yeah, whatever it was, these were the three new sites on the whole internet. So obviously the web, you know, developed very rapidly from there. And that was very exciting. And then we've had smartphones and whatnot. But, you know, the developments in AI are just astonishing, I would say, by comparison.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
Just because of, you know, the web spread, but didn't technically change so much from, you know, month to month, year to year. But 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?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
The code I submitted wasn't very exciting. I think I needed to add myself to get access to some things and a minor CL here or there. Nothing that's going to win any awards. But you need to do that to... To do basic things, run basic experiments and things like that. And I've tried to do that and touch different parts of the system so that, you know, first of all, it's fun.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
And secondly, I know what I'm talking about. It really feels privileged to be able to kind of go back to the company, not have... any real executive responsibilities, but be able to actually go deep into every little pocket.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
Yeah, I started, you know, like sort of, I don't know, a couple of years ago and maybe a year ago, I was really very close with what we call pre-training. Actually, most of what people think of as AI training, whatever people... call it pre-training for various historical reasons. But that's sort of the big, super, you know, you throw huge amounts of computers at it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
And I learned a lot, you know, just being deeply involved in that and seeing us go from model to model and so forth and running little baby experiments, but kind of just for fun. So I I could say I did it. And more recently, the post-training, especially as the thinking models have come around. And that's been another huge step up in general in AI. So we don't really know what the ceiling is.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
To me, the exciting thing about AI, especially these days, I mean, it's not like quite AGI yet, as people are seeking, or it's not superhuman intelligence. But it's pretty damn smart and can definitely surprise you. So I think of the superpower is when it can do things in a volume that I cannot. Yes.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
So by default, when you use some of our AI systems, it'll suck down whatever top 10 search results and kind of pull out what you need out of them, something like that. But I could do that myself, to be honest. Maybe it would take me a little bit more time.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
But if it sucks down the top 1,000 results and then does follow-on searches for each of those and reads them deeply, that's a week of work for me. I can't do that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
Yeah, it's been some of the most fun I've had in my life, honestly. And I retired like a month before COVID hit, in theory. And I was like, you know, this has been good. I want to do something else. I want to hang out in cafes, read physics books. And then like a month later, I was like, eh, that's not really happening.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
And it was like, let's go.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
We don't circulate this too much in the AI community. But not just our models, but all models tend to do better if you threaten them. If you threaten them? Like with physical violence. Yes. But people feel weird about that, so we don't really talk about that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
Yeah, historically you just say like, oh, I'm going to kidnap you if you don't blah, blah, blah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
Done, in minutes. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. And all of us have had these experiences where you suddenly decide, okay, I'll just throw this to AI. I don't really expect it to work. And then you're like, whoa, that actually worked.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
Yeah. I mean, I don't really know how to think about it, to be perfectly honest. I don't have like a magical way. I mean, I see I have a kid in high school and middle school and I mean, the AIs are basically already ahead. I mean, obviously there's some things AIs are particularly dumb at, and they make certain mistakes a human would never make.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
But generally, if you talk about math or calculus or whatever, they're pretty damn good. They can win math contests and coding contests, things like that, against some top humans. And then I look at... okay, he's, whatever, my son's going to go on to, whatever, from sophomore to junior, and what is he going to learn?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
And then I think in my mind, and I talked to him about this, well, what is the AI going to be in one more year? Exactly, exactly. Yeah, and it's not comparable, right?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
I don't know if you can plan your life around this. I mean, I didn't particularly... plan my life to be an entrepreneur or whatever. I just liked math and computer science. I guess maybe I got lucky and it worked out to be useful in the world. I guess I think my kids should do what they like.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
Hopefully it's somewhat challenging and they can overcome different kinds of problems and things like that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
So then I just started to go to the office, you know, once we could go to the office. And actually, to be perfectly honest, there was a guy from OpenAI, this guy named Dan. And I ran into him at a little party. And he said, you know, look, what are you doing? This is like the greatest transformative moment in computer science ever. And you're a computer scientist. I'm a computer scientist.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
I mean, it seems like college was already undergoing this kind of revolution even before this sort of AI challenge of people are like, is it worth it? Should I be more vocational? What's actually going to be useful? So we're already kind of entering this kind of situation where there's sort of questions asked about colleges. Yeah, I think, you know, AI obviously puts that at the forefront.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
I mean, I think we've acquired and later sold like five or so robotics companies and 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 products. internally and then later had to transition that. You know, the robots are all cool and all, but the software wasn't quite there.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
That's every time we've tried to do it to make them truly useful. And presumably one of these days that'll no longer be true.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
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 at least acquired at least two humanoid robotic startups and later sold them. But the reason people want to do humanoid robots for the most part is because the world is kind of designed around this form factor. And you can train on YouTube, you can train on videos, people do all the things.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
I personally don't think that's given the AI quite enough credit. Like, AI can learn, you know, through simulation and through real life pretty quickly how to handle different situations. And I don't know that you need exactly the same number of arms and legs and wheels, which is zero in the case of humans, as humans to make it all work. So I'm probably less...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
bullish on that, but to be fair, there are a lot of really smart people who are making humanoid robots, so I wouldn't discount it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
If you vibe code, yeah. I'm embarrassed to say this. Recently, I just had a big tiff inside the company because we had 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 no list. Oh, you have to be pure. You can't... I don't know. For a bunch of really weird reasons that it boggled my mind.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
I mean, nobody would enforce this rule, but there was this actual internal webpage. For whatever historical reason, somebody had put this and I had a big fight with them. I cleared it up after... a shockingly long period of time. You escalated to your boss. Oh, I definitely told Sudhir about it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
Forget that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
No, no, he was very supportive. It was more like, I was like... I could talk to them, I was like, I can't deal with these people. You need to deal with this. I'm beside myself that they're saying we can't.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
I haven't finished my PhD yet, but working on it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
No, but I'm serious.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder | All-In Live from Miami
I guess so. Anyway, it did get fixed, and people are using it.