Why Google’s co-founder left retirement to work on AI

Last Saturday, about 200 people crowded into the ballroom of a $68 million Silicon Valley mansion for a hackathon.

As the room filled with AI startup founders, investors, and researchers, the microphone was unceremoniously handed to a curly-haired man wearing a T-shirt and cargo pants. Without introducing himself, he explained that he was there to stall for the event’s surprise speaker, who was running late.

“I’m always expected to have brilliant insights into the world of tech and AI and so forth,” he told the room. “But it’s hard to compete with all of you.”

The audience started to wonder: was he a celebrity they didn’t recognize? As guesses started to be whispered, some people pulled out their phones to search and quickly realized the irony of doing so. As one attendee recounted to me afterward: “It took a couple of minutes for us to all realize we were looking at the fucking co-founder of Google.”

That Sergey Brin could go almost unrecognized at an AI hackathon in Silicon Valley these days is both wild and not surprising. With an estimated net worth of over $100 billion, he has kept an extremely low profile since 2019, when he and Larry Page stopped running Google’s day to day and handed the reins to Sundar Pichai. While the two co-founders have since faded from the public eye, they continue to wield tremendous power thanks to their wealth and the majority voting control they still have over Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

For a while, it looked like both men would be content with their various pursuits outside of Google — Page with his flying car startups and Fiji islands and Brin with his high-tech airships. Everything changed toward the end of last year, when Google needed to respond to the rise of ChatGPT and the generative AI boom.

Numerous media reports have said that Google’s co-founders are now back in the building, counseling on the company’s various AI efforts. Brin, in particular, has been coming into the office multiple times a week to work closely on the development of Gemini, the search giant’s next-generation AI model that is being announced later this year.

Like Page, Brin has no social media presence and hasn’t given an interview in years. While he has been spotted recently at social events on Google’s campus and at random parties, hearing him talk in public is akin to a unicorn sighting. And there he was last weekend at the hackathon in the posh Bay Area neighborhood of Hillsborough, taking audience questions.

“I’m curious, why did you decide to come back to Google?”

“I was pretty much retired right around the start of the pandemic,” Brin responded, per audio of the event an attendee graciously shared with me. “This AI revolution is just incredible. I’ve never experienced a time in technology and computer science as revolutionary as this, and I didn’t want to miss out. I think we’re all reaping the rewards of the excitement of that. What an exciting time to be alive.”

The questions kept coming: What have you been doing during retirement? “Studying quantum field theory.” How will humans derive value if AI eventually does all our work for us? “I don’t need the income. Actually, I don’t get paid.” (Brin certainly hasn’t lost his dry sense of humor.)

The mansion he was speaking at is called the AGI House, a place where people build AI companies and live and work together. AGI stands for artificial general intelligence, a “God-mode” kind of AI that OpenAI and others are racing to build. Fittingly, the mansion was previously a popular spot for parties thrown by Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s former head of AI who recently rejoined OpenAI to work on AGI. He took questions from the room alongside Brin during last weekend’s hackathon.

The discussion turned to an approach for building AI called reinforcement learning from human feedback, or RLHF. There are differing opinions as to whether RLHF — a process that involves human beings training an AI agent before it’s unleashed on the world — will be adequate to build true AGI. Humans, after all, can only teach a robot so much, right?

Karpathy suggested that removing the human oversight from reinforcement learning (RL) will be necessary to achieve true AGI so that an agent can truly learn on its own and achieve superintelligence. “I would say that as long as you’re stuck in a supervised learning regime, you’re upper bound by the best human ability,” he told the room. That approach can achieve a system that is like “millions of humans at [Albert] Einstein-levels” of intelligence, he said, but “if you want to go beyond that, I do think you need to reach for RL.”

Brin seemed to agree, though his response was much simpler (and again elicited laughs from the audience): “We do have RLHF today and we don’t have AGI today, as far as I know, except for whatever is in Andrej’s closet.”

The surprise speaker Brin was stalling for was none other than Grimes, who eventually showed up to give her thoughts on the intersection of AI and art. “We should not outsource everything or we will forget how to make things,” she said when asked about the future of AI-generated music. “I call it post-industrialization of the mind.” The role of music labels in the future? “I don’t think we should have record deals,” though she thinks that, in the short term, record deals may be what saves human-made music from being supplanted by AI.

For Rocky Yu, a former startup founder who now runs the AGI House, events like last weekend’s are meant to inspire the next generation of founders building AI companies. “Even the people who work in AI don’t realize how important this is,” he told me after the event. “We think it’s a once in a century opportunity.”

Though not technically affiliated with Yu’s house in Hillsborough, another AGI hacker house is soon opening in the San Francisco neighborhood of Clarendon Heights. Like the main AGI House, it will accept a handful of residents and host events for outsiders to attend. Yu told me he’s thinking of adopting an incubator model so that startup founders can receive funding for participating. For now, he’s happy to see the rising interest in the regular dinners and events the AGI House puts on.

Having guests like Brin, Grimes, and Karpathy certainly helps build buzz. “Sergey’s words struck a chord for me,” Lina Colucci, an AI startup founder who attended, later told me. “It feels like things are moving really fast, but to hear that from him, it means a lot.”

The other day I opened TikTok and noticed something new: a separate Shop tab to the left of my For You and Following feeds.

TikTok’s interest in becoming a shopping destination is well documented at this point. It’s already common to see products linked in videos that you can buy inside the app, for example. But, short of this Semafor report from late June, I have yet to see TikTok actually introduce its own marketplace for brands until now.

The TikTok Shop interface I’m in the test group for looks very similar to Amazon, Temu, or any other e-commerce store. TikTok is trying to juice early interest by prominently promoting a 40 percent off coupon when you first open the storefront, though it’s only 40 percent up to $20. The brands TikTok has onboarded early are generally impressive. I can buy everything from a PS5 to Common Projects shoes directly in the app, all with Apple Pay and reasonably fast shipping. The in-app buyer policy says these items come directly from the sellers.

“We’re experimenting with a new marketplace feature that enables people to seamlessly shop from a diverse selection of products and merchants on TikTok,” TikTok spokesperson Misha Rindisbacher told me in an emailed statement. He confirmed that I’m part of a small test that is underway in the US, UK, and southwest Asia but declined to provide any details on a wider rollout.

While e-commerce has been a big success for TikTok’s sister app in China, Douyin, I’m skeptical that the same approach will work in the US. At its core, TikTok is an entertainment app. It’s hard to see how people will be rewired to also treat it as their online shopping destination, especially with so many established alternatives already out there. For that reason, I’m more bullish about the company’s shopping features that integrate directly into videos you’re watching versus a centralized storefront.

Here’s an update on how equity compensation at the company formerly known as Twitter is going to work going forward. As I previously reported, Elon Musk is changing how compensation at X works to reflect the way SpaceX does it, meaning regular opportunities for employees to sell their shares in tender offers. (For those who don’t know, that is when an investor — typically a VC friend of Musk’s, in this case — decides to buy equity from existing shareholders in a private company at a set price.)

Per an email that went out last week to X employees, they should expect the details of their new stock awards soon based on vesting that technically began in March of this year. (Employees who were there at the time have IOU letters confirming that as well.) No details about what X’s valuation will be was shared in the email, though employees were told they’ll know the number of shares they are getting next month and can expect more details then.

Importantly, those who still have shares vesting at Musk’s generous acquisition price of $54.20 will continue to see those paid out in cash as well, the email confirms. That resolves a key concern that has been floating around the walls for the past several months given Musk’s penchant to not honor contracts.

This all suggests that the date is soon approaching when Musk will have to formally acknowledge X Corp.’s current valuation. That number will be very revealing about the state of the business…

As I wrote on The Verge earlier this week, the Musk versus Mark Zuckerberg fight is officially over.

When the possibility of it happening still loomed, I was frequently asked how likely I thought it would be that the two men actually hit the mat. I always answered that there was a 50 percent chance. The truth was always that no one, including Musk and Zuckerberg, knew what was actually going to happen.

Now that this bizarre fever dream of a tech news cycle is over, we can all move on to more important things, like whether Threads will have juice to be a viable X / Twitter competitor in the long term. Zuckerberg seems set on competing in a UFC fight, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see him in a main event in the near future.

Musk, on the other hand, will forever point to this saga ending because Zuckerberg chickened out of a last-minute fight in his backyard. For Musk, it was always about optics.

A roundup of what else is going on in the tech world this week:

I’ll be back next week with another issue.

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