Sergey Brin

Sergey Brin (born 1973 in Moscow) emigrated to the United States as a child and co-founded Google with Larry Page at Stanford in 1998. He ran Google’s moonshot lab X, became president of Alphabet, and stepped back from day-to-day work in 2019 as one of the wealthiest people in the world.

Back in the trenches for Gemini

ChatGPT’s launch pulled him out of retirement. By 2023 Brin was back at Google working on what became Gemini — filing code changes himself — and at the All-In Summit in September 2024 he said he was in the office “pretty much every day” because, as a computer scientist, he had never seen anything as exciting as recent AI progress. He has also predicted that AI will touch every part of Google’s business and beyond.

In February 2025, a leaked internal memo first reported by The New York Times showed Brin urging Gemini staff to be in the office “at least every weekday,” calling 60 hours a week “the sweet spot of productivity,” and declaring that “the final race to AGI is afoot.” The memo drew sharp criticism: Gizmodo noted the irony of demanding grueling hours to build AI that could replace the very workers putting them in, and labor advocates read it as a symbol of the industry’s race-at-all-costs culture.

Brin remains a board member and controlling shareholder of Alphabet, and his return gave Google’s AI push a founder’s imprimatur that few competitors can match.