Google co-founder Sergey Brin has told engineers that they should return to the office five days a week to help improve AI models that could replicate their work. The reclusive billionaire himself started returning to Mountain View following the launch of ChatGPT, which left Google on its back foot and raised concerns the company had fallen behind on a technology that had been developed within its own walls but capitalized upon by an outside competitor.
Now, Brin is trying to instill more urgency amongst employees, telling other Googlers working on AI that they must pick up the pace if they are going to win against the likes of OpenAI and Microsoft.
“Competition has accelerated immensely and the final race to A.G.I. is afoot,” he wrote in a memo seen by The New York Times that was directed at engineers working on Gemini, the name for its AI models and apps. “I think we have all the ingredients to win this race, but we are going to have to turbocharge our efforts.” He added that “60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity.”
Brin wrote that engineers should use Google’s own AI models for coding, saying doing so will make them “the most efficient coders and A.I. scientists in the world.”
The irony of Brin’s call should not be lost on anyone. Generative artificial intelligence ingests large amounts of writing from the web and recognizes patterns to produce new writing, including code. Major companies like Salesforce and Klarna have been beating the drums on AI’s ability to replicate engineers as the technology becomes better. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, outright said on the company’s recent earnings call that it does not plan to hire engineers this year because of the success of AI agents created and used by the company.
It is important to take these claims with a grain of salt, as leaders of these companies have incentives to slow hiring to save money and capitalize on investor excitement around AI. Code-writing bots may be good at improving efficiency by automating some boilerplate code, but skeptics say engineers need to understand the code to fix problems or make improvements (ironically, Anthropic asks applicants to certify they will not use AI in the application process). There are fears that some companies will replace humans with AI even if the technology performs worse because the cost savings will make it worth the trade-off.
Proponents of AI say that the technology will lead to more work for engineers, not less, because it will enable companies to build more products on their roadmap that they did not have the time or resources for previously. Still, it is not hard to liken Brin’s call to the manager who asks a senior employee to train their younger, more affordable replacement.
Return-to-office has been a divisive issue not just in tech but across the entire global workforce, as corporate executives have sought to retake control from staff who were empowered during the pandemic. But it has especially been a lightning rod issue in Silicon Valley, where the products that enabled remote work, like Zoom, were built. Engineers historically wielded much power thanks to the high demand for talent, but years of mass layoffs following the pandemic have flipped the script, and most major tech companies have begun demanding employees back to the office, arguing doing so will lead to higher productivity.