MC.53: Guess Why Sergey Brin is Back at Google?

Hey everyone,

Sergey Brin is back at Google, actively working on AI every day. He gave an interview at the All-In Summit where we can glean some interesting insights.

He's writing code again, but with a twist. Brin now asks AI to do the heavy lifting. He had an AI write code to generate Sudoku puzzles, then solve them.

He’s experiencing the same thing I did in the past weeks: going from High-level programming to Chat-Oriented Programming (CHOP).

AI is touching everything, not just search and coding. He believes we're moving towards unified AI models. But he's not sold on the idea of a "god model" that can do it all.

On compute power, Brin is cautious about wild predictions. He says algorithmic improvements might outpace the need for more computing muscle.

Google was too timid with language models at first. He's pushing for faster deployment, even if it means some embarrassing mistakes. "This capability is magic," he says. "You need to be willing to have some embarrassments and take some risks."

They’ve been slow and made terrible mistakes anyway so I can’t disagree with that one.

He's not obsessed with beating competitors, but Brin does keep an eye on the scoreboard. "We were number one on some benchmarks for a couple weeks".

We will see if having Sergey back will push Google to the frontside of AI. In the meantime, others are pushing:

• Mistral released Pixtral, their first open-source multimodal model released under the Apache 2 license

• Groq set a new speed record, reclaiming the lead in front of Cerebras

• Hume released a new voice-to-voice foundation model

Sam

PS: watch the interview of Sergey Brin below.

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Until next Thursday 🎉