Sergey Brin Says ‘final Race To A.G.I. Is Afoot’ And Google Has To ‘turbocharge’ Efforts

At I/O 2024 last May, Demis Hassabis reiterated that DeepMind’s goal is “building AGI: Artificial general intelligence, a system that has human-level cognitive capabilities.” This week, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said that “the final race to A.G.I. is afoot.”

The New York Times reported on an internal memo sent by Sergey Brin to the Gemini team on Wednesday. Since early 2023, Brin has been taking a more active role in Google’s AI division. 

“Competition has accelerated immensely and the final race to A.G.I. is afoot,” he wrote. “I think we have all the ingredients to win this race, but we are going to have to turbocharge our efforts.”

In terms of “ingredients,” Brin said the Gemini team has to be the “most efficient coders and A.I. scientists in the world by using our own A.I.”

He highlighted the need for Google’s employees to use more of its A.I. for coding, saying the A.I.’s improving itself would lead to A.G.I.

The other ingredient is a call for employees to double down on their work. This includes a recommendation of “being in the office at least every weekday” and that “60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity,” while warning that more might result in burnout. 

Google and AGI

Historically, artificial general intelligence has been the end goal for those working on AI. That said, there is no industry-agreed definition of what exactly AGI looks like. In November 2023, Google DeepMind proposed (PDF) a “framework for classifying the capabilities and behavior of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) models and their precursors.”

Looking at the competition, Sam Altman at the start of 2025 said OpenAI knows “how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it,” with “superintelligence” as the next goal.

Before Brin’s memo this week, Google reiterated that it’s “build[ing] towards AGI” when Gemini 2.0 was announced in December.

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