Google co-founder Sergey Brin is so impressed with Artificial Intelligence (AI) that he wants the search engine staff to give it their best shot so that they can win the AI race. Unfortunately, what this essentially means is that Google workers are being asked to work hard to create something that could one day replace them.

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Brin handed over the daily work to other people and stepped away in 2019. However, AI has led him to come back, and now he wants everyone to set their eyes on artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Artificial superintelligence
Artificial superintelligence Photograph: (Pexels)

 

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While generative AI is all the rage right now, Brin is focused on AGI, a thinking machine that would be much more advanced than the current AI models.

Notably, AI took wings at Google but it was OpenAI that ultimately leapt ahead with ChatGPT. Now Brin seems panicked and is urging workers to spend more time in the office to "turbocharge" their efforts.

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In a memo seen by the New York Times, he has urged the engineers working on Gemini, Google's AI model, to "pick up the pace" and spend “60 hours a week" in the office, calling it "the sweet spot of productivity." 

Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence Photograph: (Pexels)

 

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Engineers in Silicon Valley have been excited about AI and believe that AGI can surpass it by leaps and bounds. According to experts, while current AI models only do a good impression of thinking, an AGI would be able to even think like a human being. Such a feature would mean that AGI would be a conscious entity, translating to something that could one day replace humans.

Brin wants the engineers to use Google's own Gemini AI tools to develop this advanced AI entity. 

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Generative AI has created a sense of doom among people as it is likely to replace humans across different fields of work. Developing AI further can lead to the creation of something that can even replace engineers one day and some companies have already hopped on the bandwagon.

For example, Salesforce has created AI agents and put them to use successfully. CEO Marc Benioff cited this as a reason during the company's recent earnings for not hiring engineers in the coming year.

So it only seems ironic that companies would ask engineers to work 12 hours a day from the office to create their replacements, an entity that would put them out of the job. 

Artificial superintelligence and AGI

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the future of AI and will be so highly advanced that it will be able to replicate human cognitive capabilities. This is in contrast to narrow AI models that can only perform specific tasks. Experts believe that AGI or Artificial superintelligence (ASI) would exceed even human cognitive abilities. Different companies and experts have different timelines for its development. While some think it might be possible to have AGI within a few decades, others believe it might take over a century. Others don't think it is possible ever to develop such an intelligence.