Google’s founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have long taken a hands-off approach to their company, even though they are still in full control over it thanks to their voting power. While Larry Page seems to stick to this, Sergey Brin is reportedly showing up at Google much more often recently, with him helping the company to advance in its AI endeavors like ChatGPT competitor Google Bard.
Sergey Brin is showing up at Google offices about three to four days every week, reports the WSJ, citing people familiar with the matter, ever since the resounding hype surrounding ChatGPT started late last year. The founder is particularly working with the AI team that is building the next-generation AI model Gemini, which is supposed to outperform other models like ChatGPT currently available on the market.
Sergey Brin is mostly using his role to support the hiring process, selecting some key personnel after the company lost a lot of important researchers in the area. Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai doesn’t seem concerned about the newfound involvement, and is reportedly even welcoming and encouraging it.
The co-founder has brushed aside AI for years, as some employees talking to the WSJ claim. He supposedly had to catch up on the latest developments, and admitted publicly at some point that he ignored the early work of Google’s Brain division, which was one to pioneer a lot of the developments we’re seeing around AI these days.
Following the success of ChatGPT, Google scrambled to find an answer to the widely celebrated large language model chatbot. The company threw together a launch event to introduce Google Bard, its take on OpenAI’s competing product. Google Bard was perceived as widely less sophisticated and more prone to errors, and lacked a few key capabilities like coding. Over the last few months, the tool caught up a lot, though, and is now right up there with ChatGPT and Bing Chat. Google can rely on its vast body of products here, with Google Lens integration being one of the latest trumps coming to Bard.
