Google's AI Charge, and the Return of Brin

Back from retirement, Google's co-founder has a single-minded focus—beating OpenAI

- Shouvik Das

In Mountain View, California, right next to Google's three million square-feet Googleplex headquarters, is a satellite office. While, from the outside, there's nothing seemingly special about it, the building currently houses an elite team of specialist engineers who have been tasked with only one thing: build the best foundational artificial intelligence (AI) model in the world. At the center of its biggest room sits a man who many in Silicon Valley refer to as a living legend—Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder.

Brin retired in December 2019 but returned to the company last year to lead a light brigade of over 300 engineers, all of whom are charging at OpenAI's GPT models, Google's primary rival in a high-stakes battle. OpenAI's GPT models are disrupting the way people search, posing an existential threat to Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company.

Brin is spearheading the development of Gemini, Google's suite of foundational AI models. Gemini's success, or failure, would impact two major areas within Alphabet—Search, and the nascent space of video generation.

For one, Search currently accounts for 56% of Alphabet's annual revenue of $350 billion. Search is also a matter of personal pride for Brin and Larry Page, Google's second founder. Giving up its market dominance in Search means letting go of the duo's legacy—their entire life's work.

Alongside Search, Brin was also concerned about Sora, OpenAI's video generation model. Last year, Google briefly showcased Veo, its video-generating foundational model. However, the market found Veo to be an effort from Google to catch-up with OpenAI.

"This prompted Brin's efforts to create Google Flow this year and launch the AI subscription plans—all a part of his efforts to show that Google, in fact, is still the behemoth as far as Big Tech is concerned," said a senior executive working on the integration of AI in Google's cloud offerings. He didn't want to be identified.