Google co-founder Sergey Brin on leaving retirement to work on AI | Hacker News Reader

Google co-founder Sergey Brin on leaving retirement to work on AI

theverge.com

66 pointsmoonraker25 comments

I have to laugh at an unrecognized Sergey Brin talking to stall for time at an AI hackathon while the audience waits for the real speaker, Grimes. That's a very enjoyable picture.

Right? Feels like something out of Silicon Valley.

I mean are these people anything more than influencers in the AI world?

A googler told me how Sergey would sit down at any table in the cafeteria. New hires would ask him what he did at the company.

I used to ride a contractor shuttle to NASA’s JSC. Pair of new hires and a colorfully dressed woman being escorted on the bus. Upon us getting off, one new hire looked around and said “I wonder if we’ll see any astronauts.” The woman was Sally Ride.

Google was never the same after Sergey left. With him, all employees, execs, investors shared the original credos of organizing the world's information.

And after him, it became like any corporation, with everyone seeking to gain as much personal wealth as they could. The dream was dead.

I saw this firsthand.

How much was Eric Schmidt a factor in the culture?

Ive read that a lot of the early days of Google being the Google we used to love were down to Schmidt.

We dont hear much about him, so I’ve always wondered.

Schmidt succeeded with Google where John Scully failed Apple!

When do you think Sergey left? Wikipedia says he was president of alphabet until 2019, but I feel like he was sort of an absentee leader for years before that. Eric Schmidt was CEO until 2011. Larry Page was CEO until 2015 when Sundar became CEO and Ruth Porat became CFO. To me, these felt like more significant changes, but honestly everything was probably very gradual.

By retiring early, he sorta let Google, this still immature organization, get completely steamrolled by the board. I used to work there and the culture shifted rapidly upon his departure.

Could you elaborate on the changes?

First was the elimination of TGIF, a weekly meeting where Larry and Sergei would come out in the flesh and answer some of the most politically sensitive questions you could imagine right there at 1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, second was the rule of CFO Ruth Porat who eliminated many bets and turned Google into a lean mean ad selling machine. Sundar Pichai seemed too distant or disinterested to fully engage with Googlers or fight for their interests. For example, his first order of business was to take over one of the three buildings off Charleston and make it off limits to mere mortals. Maybe that is good for share holders, but it wasn't the Google I ever signed up for.

As a general rule of thumb, any publicly-traded company of sufficient size becomes beholden to shareholders and shareholders only, out of necessity.

That's why I inmediately grow suspicious of any mid-to-large sized enterprise that goes public. They all deserve to be looked at with wary eyes.

This link (for me anyway) doesn't cause the loop like the other one:

https://archive.is/rRVo4

This is the same link.

Well it did work yesterday, but for some reason today, it's doing the same loop when you click 'i am not a robot' sigh

oligarchs of current year aren’t so different from their ancestors, blood or money.

throwing parties and talking and listening to each other talk.

edit: did the downvoters not read the article, or attend the party? if the latter, how was the surprise guest? was the x around?

the first niche research paper I found looking recently, on a niche topic.. was "AI for reading research papers" that looked for nouns associated with this niche, and then the context, and did that for thousands of publications. That writeup was released publicly in 2018.

If you think a founder of Google does not have tools like that on Day0, you might be in for some surprises in a year.

Are they able to convert research papers to HTML yet?

html to a nice printable pdf is harder, btw.

https://archive.ph/rRVo4

Thanks, didn't realize Verge was also paywalled these days.

That seems to lead to an endless CAPTCHA loop.

This does make for good media, but does anyone believe that adding one more cook to the kitchen at Google is going to measurably change their trajectory in this area?

Maybe not, but management does have outsized effects on culture which _can_ be a game-changer for trajectory.

One more cook with god mode access, yes. Imagine driving through a city and all the lights turning green. Agility at large companies is hampered by middle management and a fast pass helps.

Paywalled so I will not attempt to read but the first little bit... Just makes me imagine what it must be like to be one of these elite engineer types at insanely luxurious parties talking to "experts" all day long and I have to take a hard look in the mirror and wonder why my life is such ... s***.

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