Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, declaring in an internal memo leaked to The New York Times a few weeks ago that employees should work a lot more to win the “race to AGI” is frankly bizarre.
As quoted by the article, there are some absolute gems in this memo like “60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity” and “the final race to A.G.I is afoot”.
Months ago, another internal Google memo had leaked hinting that top minds at Google are well-aware that so far there are no moats in AI. It foreshadowed the new reality we’re almost certainly in now where LLMs are poised to be commoditized. Perhaps Sergey Brin didn’t get that memo.
I can’t help but think that this same bullshit alarmism about this race that’s become so rampant among the topmost executives in big tech is what could’ve led a company like Apple to its most recent and possibly worst debacle to date. I wrote about Apple Intelligence in June of last year, and I’d love to write about it again, but there’s not much to say, other than that it’s an absolute crock of shit. There’s nothing that Apple Intelligence does that ChatGPT or Claude can’t do 10x better. I don’t think anyone could do more justice than John Gruber has in his phenomenal essay last week.
I think lots of people are missing the point that the whole premise of AI is so that humans can work a lot less so they have more time to do more things they enjoy, build relationships and focus on their life outside of work. Now, how that would impact the ability of people to pay their bills or the impact on job displacement is an investigation for another day (spoiler: nobody knows). But, Brin’s claims that Google employees working on Gemini are the “most efficient coders and AI scientists in the world” along with his statements that people need to work 50% more, is beyond logic.
If Google wants more capacity, the answer is to sunset more than half their products that shouldn’t have existed in the first place and build better products, not normalize techno-dystopian policies.
Also, what a load of BS this return-to-office mandate is across the tech industry. The pandemic brought remote work to the mainstream after a handful of companies had already been successfully practicing it for years, one of which even wrote a best-selling book. Then, these techno-colonialists push back on it with all their phony arguments that mainly point to mistrust and a need to assert greater control over workers’ lives.
It’s all feeling a bit Lumon-y, if you ask me.