Google co-founder Sergey Brin says Google could achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) if employees worked harder and were in the office more, saying: “Sixty hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity.”
AGI is a type of AI that matches or even surpasses human cognitive abilities. AGI can understand and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks like a human, rather than across a limited set of use cases.
In an internal memo first spotted by The New York Times and sent to employees working on Gemini, Google’s suite of AI products, Brin said: “Competition has accelerated immensely, and the final race to AGI is afoot.”
He added: “I think we have all the ingredients to win this race, but we are going to have to turbocharge our efforts.”
Brin hit out at employees he doesn’t think are pulling their weight, singling out those who “work less than 60 hours” and “a small number [who] put in the bare minimum to get by.” He called those doing the bare minimum “not only unproductive but also highly demoralizing to everyone else.”
Brin also recommended that employees trek to the office at least every weekday, contrary to Google’s official return-to-the-office policy, which mandates three days a week on-site.
Google’s AI staffers are apparently already familiar with brutal workloads. Google’s search boss, Prabhakar Raghavan, claimed that Gemini staff were at one point putting in 120 hours a week to fix a flaw in Google’s image recognition tool, according to a CNBC report.
Google isn’t the only company making pronouncements about the impending arrival of AGI, with staff feeling under intense pressure in the process.
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in January that OpenAI is “now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it,” and that in the next few years, “everyone will see what we see.” Meanwhile, some of OpenAI’s technical staff have highlighted six-day weeks and 10-hour-plus days in their resignation messages.
Employees at Elon Musk’s start-up xAI have also disclosed 12-hour-plus working days. Musk himself has pegged the arrival of AGI at some point in 2026 in interviews.
The jury is still out on whether AGI is even a realistic short-term goal in the first place. Many in the AI community are more pessimistic about the AGI dream. Gary Marcus, professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University, has directly critiqued the claims of tech CEOs like Altman, pointing out the numerous technical issues holding back the development of true AGI.
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About Will McCurdy
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