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Sergey Brin's Unretirement

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Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#101

Post by dmitrygr »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #94
cuttothechase wrote: post #47

Sergey's challenge looks like is not in retiring early or with non-work. We had a high performing co-worker who was scared witless after a lay-off episode and this was not because he was worried about lacking money or loss of prestige., but because he could not come to terms with the simple fact of facing the 9 am on a Monday morning with absolutely no expectations. It freaked so much to not feel the hustle and the a…

I took a career break and was weirded out by the question of "how do I introduce myself?". So used to saying "Hi, I'm Marcus, I'm IT Director of " that suddenly having nothing to say there was strange. When people asked "what do you do?" I had no good answer, and that felt like I had no good identity. I guess for Sergey Brin it's a little different, he will always be "Founder of Google" even if he leaves Google. But…

> When people asked "what do you do?"

I found that outside of CA, this is asked a lot less often. In CA people ask that so they can mentally rank you as worth their time or not. Elsewhere, people ask you how your weekend went, or how your family is. One of the awesome parts of moving to Austin was not hearing that as the first question as much.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#102

Post by csomar »

beambot wrote: post #89
cuttothechase wrote: post #47

Sergey's challenge looks like is not in retiring early or with non-work. We had a high performing co-worker who was scared witless after a lay-off episode and this was not because he was worried about lacking money or loss of prestige., but because he could not come to terms with the simple fact of facing the 9 am on a Monday morning with absolutely no expectations. It freaked so much to not feel the hustle and the a…

Sounds a bit... Neurodivergent.

I am guessing if you have been doing this daily for a couple decades then the neurodivergence is not going through this. I assume any normal person will find it hard to not do any kind of work and if you spent 20 years of your life doing tech, how useful are in the "real" world. Unless you have been doing handy work on the sides, spoiler alert: not much.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#103

Post by neilv »

ngcazz wrote: post #78
drewda wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just millions. Shanahan received over a billion dollars when divorcing Brin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicole_Shanahan Today's unscientific gutting of the CDC's childhood vaccine schedule is what is being accomplished with all that $GOOG money. It's honestly very disturbing and rather than discuss it as a matter of politics, I'll just say that as a parent I'll be following the AAP's vaccination recommend…

While Brin comes back to Google to advocate for 60h workweeks as it lays off thousands of employees.

I'd be happy to do 60-hour weeks of good work, in a good environment.

I wouldn't want 60-hour weeks of dealing with a lot of promotion-seekers, though.

I wonder how different Google would be if they'd just paid people enough money they didn't have to think about money, but it was the same amount of money to everyone. You do the work, not for promotions, but because you like doing the work. You can train up for and transfer to different kinds of roles, but they pay the same.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#104

Post by rl3 »

FatalLogic wrote: post #72

I wish he'd brought back "Don't Be Evil" to Google, as well as himself.

>"Don't Be Evil"

That ship sailed a long time ago. It then proceeded to sink, ending up a haunted wreck that we might see in a new Pirates of the Caribbean film.

Problem is, Captain Jack Sparrow these days isn't what he used to be either.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#105

Post by energy123 »

m348e912 wrote: post #38
LarsDu88 wrote: post #26

Sergey unretires, Gemini suddenly becomes the top LLM (for a week or two at least) Google has made some subtle moves that a lot of folks missed, possibly with Sergey's influence. Like hiring back Noam Shazeer, who practically invented the backbone of the technology. It's good to have folks with presumptions of being scientists actually run companies for once. That being said, I wish his ex-wife hadn't spent her milli…

I don't know who to credit, maybe it's Sergey, but the free Gemini (fast) is exceptional and at this point I don't see how OpenAI can catch back up. It's not just capability, but OpenAI have added so many policy guardrails it hurts the user experience.

It's the best model pound for pound, but I find GPT 5.2 Thinking/Pro to be more useful for serious work when run with xhigh effort. I can get it to think for 20 minutes, but Gemini 3.0 Pro is like 2.5 minutes max. Obviously I lack full visibility because tok/s and token efficiency likely differs between them, but I take it as a proxy of how much compute they're giving us per inference, and it matches my subjective judgement of output quality. Maybe Google nerfs the reasoning effort in the Gemini subscription to save money and that's why I am experiencing this.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#106

Post by fragmede »

nsoonhui wrote: post #50
LarsDu88 wrote: post #26

Sergey unretires, Gemini suddenly becomes the top LLM (for a week or two at least) Google has made some subtle moves that a lot of folks missed, possibly with Sergey's influence. Like hiring back Noam Shazeer, who practically invented the backbone of the technology. It's good to have folks with presumptions of being scientists actually run companies for once. That being said, I wish his ex-wife hadn't spent her milli…

Sergey might have some positive influence on Gemini, but given that he isn't an AI scientist ( AKA no technical background), I really do wonder what sort of influence that (only) he could have had, beyond just bringing in key people.

The man that invented PageRank while going to college at Stanford for a PhD doesn't have a technical background? He did not get that PhD because he founded Google. He may not be as smart as you think you are, but he's no slouch either.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#107

Post by fragmede »

siliconc0w wrote: post #79

Sergey is brilliant but it's really the lightsaber that is super voting shares that make him uniquely empowered to slash through Google's immense bureaucracy.

I think being the founder of Google gives him more political capital at Google than anything on paper. As a controlling member of the board there's a variety of things he can do with that hammer, but just simply being who he is, not even just on the org chart, has got to be worth way more.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#108

Post by leoc »

siliconc0w wrote: post #79

Sergey is brilliant but it's really the lightsaber that is super voting shares that make him uniquely empowered to slash through Google's immense bureaucracy.

Brin wasn’t bothered to wield any of that power to try to arrest the decline in Google’s search quality. He wasn’t bothered to direct the Chrome team to support MathML, or to bring back Google Reader, or do anything about a hundred small insults like, say, the deletion of YouTube comments with URLs to keep the rubes inside the casino. But he was able and willing to come back and wield his clout because he was bored and wanted to play with AI. As someone who’s old enough to remember how much leeway Google used to get from governments and the public at large on the basis that Page and Brin were nice young men who could be relied on to be responsible stewards it’s a little galling. Don’t give Mr. Brin any belly-rubs until he tells us when Reader is coming back.

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#109

Post by mr_toad »

beambot wrote: post #89
cuttothechase wrote: post #47

Sergey's challenge looks like is not in retiring early or with non-work. We had a high performing co-worker who was scared witless after a lay-off episode and this was not because he was worried about lacking money or loss of prestige., but because he could not come to terms with the simple fact of facing the 9 am on a Monday morning with absolutely no expectations. It freaked so much to not feel the hustle and the a…

Sounds a bit... Neurodivergent.

‘You don’t have to be neurodivergent to work here… …but it helps!’

Re: Sergey Brin's Unretirement

#110

Post by alexjplant »

dmitrygr wrote: post #101
marcus_holmes wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a career break and was weirded out by the question of "how do I introduce myself?". So used to saying "Hi, I'm Marcus, I'm IT Director of " that suddenly having nothing to say there was strange. When people asked "what do you do?" I had no good answer, and that felt like I had no good identity. I guess for Sergey Brin it's a little different, he will always be "Founder of Google" even if he leaves Google. But…

> When people asked "what do you do?" I found that outside of CA, this is asked a lot less often. In CA people ask that so they can mentally rank you as worth their time or not. Elsewhere, people ask you how your weekend went, or how your family is. One of the awesome parts of moving to Austin was not hearing that as the first question as much.

> I found that outside of CA, this is asked a lot less often.

I moved to California a few years ago from the Least Coast (insert shaka, surfer, wave emojis here) and had multiple other out-of-towners in the same situation as me say the exact opposite at a party. They all were adamant that they had yet to hear "what do you do [for a living]?" since they'd moved as they did ad nauseum when they lived on the other side of the country.

I've not noticed either way. My pet theory is that people hear this frequently if their social and professional lives bleed into each other which they do if one lives in a town dominated by a specific industry or profession. Those moving westward during COVID and remote work suddenly had to contend with this much less.

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