Google co-founder Sergey Brin has been working regularly at its Mountain View offices assisting with the development of its artificial intelligence platform.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Brin was working three to four days at the campus, a marked contrast to his hands-off approach after stepping down in 2019.
Google has been building its general purpose AI engine Gemini in response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the paper reports, but is behind in gaining the public profile that OpenAI has achieved. That’s despite a head start with AI in 2011.
Alphabet merged its Brain and DeepMind teams this year to consolidate its AI push.
Brin’s involvement includes holding weekly discussions with employees about AI research, says the report.
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Gemini was in the spotlight last week when The New York Times reported that Google was pitching it to newspapers as an aid for journalists.
“Google is testing a product that uses artificial intelligence technology to produce news stories, pitching it to news organizations including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal’s owner, News Corp, according to three people familiar with the matter,” said The New York Times report.
According to the pitch, the tool was capable of generating news stories from current events.
However, there is a concern that news organisations under stress financially might use such a tool to reduce reporter numbers in newsrooms. There is also the possible loss of journalists’ individual writing skills and styles and their background knowledge. AI-generated news reports may be suited to bland event reporting but limited beyond that.
