Google co-founder Sergey Brin made a rare public appearance over the weekend, telling a group of artificial intelligence enthusiasts that he was coming out of retirement "because the trajectory of artificial intelligence is so exciting."
On Saturday, Brin, 50, spoke to entrepreneurs at the "AGI House" in Hillsboro, Calif., just south of San Francisco, where developers and founders are testing Google's Gemini model. AGI is the abbreviation of artificial general intelligence, which refers to an artificial intelligence that can complete tasks at the same level or higher than humans.
Taking questions from the audience, Brin discussed the impact of artificial intelligence on search and how Google can maintain its leadership in core markets as artificial intelligence continues to develop. He also addressed flaws in the Gemini image generator Google launched last month, which the company pulled after users discovered historical inaccuracies and questionable responses.
"We definitely had a problem with the image generation," Brin said Saturday. "I think it was mostly due to incomplete testing. It's definitely going to upset a lot of people for good reasons."
Google officials said last week that it plans to reintroduce image generation capabilities soon.
Brin co-founded Google with Larry Page in 1998 but resigned as president of Alphabet in 2019. He remains a board member and major shareholder, holding a stake in the company worth about $100 billion. He returned to work at the company to help boost Google's position in the fiercely competitive artificial intelligence market.
In some cases on Saturday, Brin said he was answering "personally" and not on behalf of the company.
"I'm very surprised to see how well these models perform year after year," he said at the event. Regarding Gemini's recent challenges that have resulted in flawed image results, he said: "We don't fully understand why it skews to the left in many cases, but that's not our intention, and the company recently improved accuracy by 80 percent in some internal tests."
Brin's comments were the first time a company executive has spoken out about the Gemini image generation error incident. Previously, Prabhakar, head of Google search department
Google declined to comment for this story.
Brin said Google is far from alone in its fight to use artificial intelligence to produce accurate results. He cited, for example, OpenAI's ChatGPT and Elon Musk's Grok services as artificial intelligence tools. "For example, they said some very strange things that definitely made people feel left-wing." There's no doubt that AI hallucinations, or incorrect responses to user prompts, remain "a big problem right now," he said.
"We're getting them to hallucinate less and less over time, but I would definitely be excited if we could get closer to zero," Brin said. "But you can't just count on a breakthrough, so I think we'll continue to take it step by step and bring it down, down, down over time."
When an attendee asked Brin if he wanted to build artificial intelligence, he responded in the affirmative and mentioned that AI could help with "reasoning."
Brin was also asked how online advertising would be disrupted, given that ad revenue is Google's core business, after the company reported that ad growth has slowed over the past few years.
"I'm not too concerned about the business model shift," Brin said. "I think it's great that for 25 years we've been able to provide everyone with world-class information search for free, supported by advertising."
He acknowledged that the business may change: "I expect the business model to evolve over time, maybe advertising, because advertising can be done better and AI can better tailor advertising."
Brin is confident in Google's position. "I personally think that as long as we can generate huge value, we can figure out the business model," he said.
Beyond artificial intelligence, Brin was asked about Google's difficulties with hardware given recent advances in virtual reality technology. It's no secret that Google entered the augmented reality market early with the now-discontinued Google Glass.
He said of Google Glass: "I feel like I made some bad decisions. If I had it another way, I would treat Google Glass as a prototype rather than a product. But, I still like the lightweight form factor."
"They're very impressive," Brin said of the Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest headsets.
When asked how he sees Gemini's impact on spatial computing or products like Google Maps or Street View, Brin's response was full of curiosity: "Honestly, I haven't thought about it yet, but now that you say it, yeah, there's no reason why we shouldn't be feeding in more 3D data, and maybe someone is working on it -- I don't know."