Sergey Brin Says AGI Race Is On, Pushes Google to Move Faster:

Sergey Brin, the cofounder of Google, is of the opinion that the competition for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has started. Earlier this week, Brin sent a memo to Google's AI department in which he urged his employees to hasten their pace as the competition has become fierce, and now is the time to put a 'turbo' effort.

Since the beginning of 2023, Brin has focused his efforts towards AI work at Google, and now he is pushing for a massive change. He intends for AI to be able to improve itself. Specifically, he wants the engineers at Google to utilize provided AI resources more freely when writing the code as he believes this is what will get them to AGI.

To top it off, he also suggested that employees work longer hours as being in the office during all weekdays and working 60 hours a week is more effective. While saying that, he did caution about burnout, but was explicit as well–there is no time to waste to ensure that Google continues to stay at the top.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is often captured as artificial intelligence that has human-level capabilities of reasoning, learning, and problem-solving instead of being limited to particular functions. There is no exact definition of AGI, but most AI companies, including Google, regard it as the holy grail of artificial intelligence.

Brin’s memo comes during an increase in competition, specifically with the latest launch of Gemini 2.0, which is Google’s latest AI model. In December the company made big moves within artificial intelligence. Also, Demis Hassabis DeepMind has been pushing towards AGI for years and his competition is not staying idle. OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman said that they already know how to build AGI and are aiming for something much more powerful, superintelligence.