Sergey Brin, who came back to Google to work on Gemini, says staying retired would have been a 'big mistake'

"Sergey Brin tried retirement - and immediately regretted it. Speaking at Stanford University's School of Engineering centennial celebration last week, the Google cofounder said he stepped back from day-to-day work in December 2019, imagining he'd spend leisurely days and "sit in cafés and study physics." Then the pandemic hit. "That didn't work because there were no more cafés," he joked. Worse, he said he felt himself "spiraling" and "kind of not being sharp" without the intellectual stimulation he'd always relied on."

"Despite publishing the 2017 " Transformer" paper that underpins nearly every major AI model today, he said Google "underinvested" in the technology and was "too scared to bring it to people because chatbots say dumb things." OpenAI, he said, "ran with it, which, good for them." Still, he said Google retained an edge through its long-standing investment in neural-network research, custom AI chips, and massive data center infrastructure. "Very few have that scale," he said."

Sergey Brin stepped back from daily work in December 2019 intending to relax and study physics, but the pandemic eliminated cafés and left him feeling "spiraling" and less sharp. He rejoined a small number of employees in Google's offices and became involved in developing Gemini, Google's flagship AI model, finding the technical creative outlet rewarding. Brin acknowledged that Google underinvested in AI deployment and hesitated to ship chatbot technology because of its flaws, while competitors like OpenAI moved faster. He emphasized Google's continued advantages in neural-network research, custom AI chips, and massive data-center scale.

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