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Yahoo
18-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Google Co-Founder Says Employees Should Be In The Office "At Least" Every Weekday As Competition In The AI Arms Race Intensifies
Benzinga and Yahoo Finance LLC may earn commission or revenue on some items through the links below. Cancel your weekends! That seemed to be the message Google (NASDAQ:GOOG, GOOGL)) co-founder Sergey Brin told employees when urging them to be in the office 'at least' every weekday. In a Feb. 26 memo to employees who work on Gemini, Google's lineup of AI models and apps, viewed by the New York Times, Brin wrote, 'I recommend being in the office at least every weekday, adding that that '60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity.' Don't Miss: If there was a new fund backed by Jeff Bezos offering a ? Many don't know there are tax benefits when buying a unit as an investment — Google's current return-to-work policy mandates that employees work in the office at least three days a week. Brin's message underscores the intense competition between tech giants to achieve artificial general intelligence when machines match or become smarter than humans. 'Competition has accelerated immensely and the final race to A.G.I. is afoot,' Brin wrote. 'I think we have all the ingredients to win this race, but we are going to have to turbocharge our efforts.' It's not only employees who are putting in the office hours. Multi-billionaires, too, are rolling up their sleeves to keep their companies ahead of the AI curve. Brin returned to Google after the launch of Chat GPT, aware, according to the Times, that his company had lost ground in the AI footrace. Brin's main focus since his return has been working with the company's AI specialists in their DeepMind division. In marshaling workers to the cause, Brin wrote: 'A number of folks work less than 60 hours and a small number put in the bare minimum to get last group is not only unproductive but also can be highly demoralizing to everyone else.' Trending: CEO of Integris gathered a team of senior investment managers who have $34.22 billion in combined owned and managed assets in the West Coast — Jeff Bezos, who stepped down as CEO of Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) in July 2021, but remained as chairman, is back in the office, trying to help the company he founded stay in the AI arms race. Bezos told the NY Times DealBook conference on Dec. 4 that 95% of his time at Amazon is spent focusing on AI within the company, which he said is building 1,000 AI applications internally. According to CEO Today, Mark Zuckerberg, who works between 50 and 60 hours per week in the office at Meta (NASDAQ:META), is also determined to wrestle back ground from ChatGPT and compete with Google by releasing a standalone Meta AI app to do just that. 'This is going to be the year when a highly intelligent and personalized AI assistant reaches more than 1 billion people, and I expect Meta AI to be that leading AI assistant,' Zuckerberg told analysts during the company's fourth-quarter earnings call in January.'At chipmaker Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), which has helped to facilitate the AI boom, employees often work seven days a week and sometimes until 2 a.m., according to a report in Bloomberg, emulating the workaholic habits of CEO Jensen Huang and fueled by the generous pay the company offers. 'I work from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed. I work seven days a week,' Huang told Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management, on the '20VC' podcast. 'When I'm not working, I'm thinking about working, and when I'm working, I'm working. I sit through movies, but I don't remember them because I'm thinking about work,' he said. Read Next: This Jeff Bezos-backed startup will allow you to . , which provides access to a pool of short-term loans backed by residential real estate with just a $100 minimum. This article Google Co-Founder Says Employees Should Be In The Office "At Least" Every Weekday As Competition In The AI Arms Race Intensifies originally appeared on Sign in to access your portfolio
New York Times
27-02-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Google's Sergey Brin Urges Workers to Return to the Office to Win A.I. Race
Since the 2022 launch of ChatGPT set off an artificial intelligence frenzy in Silicon Valley, Google has tried to reassert its role as an A.I. pioneer. On Wednesday, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, said the company could lead the industry in artificial general intelligence — when machines match or become smarter than humans — if employees worked harder. 'I recommend being in the office at least every weekday,' he wrote in a memo posted internally on Wednesday evening that was viewed by The New York Times. He added that '60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity' in the message to employees who work on Gemini, Google's lineup of A.I. models and apps. Mr. Brin's memo does not represent a change to Google's official return-to-office policy, which requires employees to work in the office at least three days a week. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment. Still, the note highlighted Mr. Brin's belief that A.G.I. — a long-sought goal in computing — could be within reach. And it shed more light on how he believes Google could achieve that technological leap. '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.' He highlighted the need for Google's employees to use more of its A.I. for coding, saying that the A.I. improving itself would lead to A.G.I. He also called on employees working on Gemini to be 'the most efficient coders and A.I. scientists in the world by using our own A.I.' More companies have ordered employees back to the office full-time to improve productivity. In September, Amazon said that its corporate employees must return to the office five days a week starting in 2025. AT&T, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs have also reversed hybrid-work policies. Mr. Brin returned to Google after ChatGPT's launch, The New York Times has reported, to help the company navigate the difficult moment when it lost its advantage in A.I. (Google had developed numerous technologies that make chatbots like ChatGPT adept at writing things like poetry, code and travel plans.) Ever since, he has spent a lot of time with the company's A.I. specialists in its Google DeepMind division tasked with developing A.I., sometimes personally filing code requests. In the two years since Mr. Brin returned, Google has reorganized its business, rebranded its A.I. and rolled out the technology across its popular apps — all in an effort to win the race against OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta and others. Google has been releasing A.I. updates at a rapid clip, expanding the availability of Gemini 2.0 models to people who use the chatbot app with the same name just this month. Mr. Brin warned against employees working more than 60 hours a week, saying it could lead to burnout. He also criticized employees who haven't been contributing enough to the efforts. 'A number of folks work less than 60 hours and a small number put in the bare minimum to get by,' he wrote. 'This last group is not only unproductive but also can be highly demoralizing to everyone else.'
New York Times
12-02-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Elon Musk in the Oval Office
We've got some more thoughts on Elon Musk's $97 billion hostile bid for Sam Altman's OpenAI, which, we're told, still hasn't been delivered to anyone at OpenAI. Assuming an offer does show up, from a legal standpoint it's actually dead on arrival. That's because the board of OpenAI has no legal fiduciary duty to maximize investor returns in the for-profit subsidiary. The only duty the board has is to the charter of the organization, which includes in its mission: 'to avoid enabling uses of A.I. or A.G.I. that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power.' It can decide whether an acquirer of its assets would fulfill that mission. So on that score alone, it could simply say no to Musk, as Altman told him in a post on X. But there's another play Musk is making: to not-so-subtly persuade the attorneys general of California (where OpenAI is based) and Delaware (where OpenAI is incorporated) to block OpenAI from turning its subsidiary into a for-profit company. Musk is already suing to do just that — and last week a judge suggested the case was a 'stretch.' His offer could be a mechanism to force an attorney general to question whatever valuation the nonprofit arm of OpenAI receives for the for-profit entity. Part of the A.G.'s role is to make sure that nonprofits get 'fair value' for their assets. But Musk's history of lawsuits against OpenAI and his public comments undermine the credibility of using his bid as a valuation metric. And given his tortured relationship with the states of California and of Delaware (he moved Tesla's headquarters to Austin and reincorporated in Texas), it seems unlikely he will get a sympathetic ear. 'Maximally transparent' Last week, President Trump breezily dismissed a Time magazine cover depicting Elon Musk sitting behind the Resolute Desk. But only a few days later, the tech mogul looked comfortable holding forth from the Oval Office, defending his drastic federal downsizing efforts. It underscored the billionaire's influence and power in breaking and reshaping the government — and how few limits he appears to face. Musk claimed that he was rooting out widespread fraud, without providing evidence of any, all in the name of restoring democracy. (Worth remembering: Some of his moves seem to have been based on conspiracy theories.) He asserted to reporters that 'all of our actions are maximally transparent' — even as his team operates largely in secrecy, putting out snippets of its work on his social network, X. Musk himself is an unpaid 'special government employee.' That designation allows him to keep confidential for now a mandatory filing of his financial interests, though he waved off any suggestion that his business empire stood to benefit from his new powers. (Below, we present a graphic showing Musk's many legal entanglements with the government.) The optics were extraordinary. Musk, a private citizen, did most of the talking, with Trump chiming in with supportive comments and instructing federal agencies to work closely with the world's richest man. Musk repeated a message that he's made on X in recent weeks: that there's plenty of room to shrink the federal government and that bureaucrats are an 'unelected, fourth, unconstitutional branch of government.' (His critics would note some irony there.) He appears to have Trump's full support, especially if it means gutting agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or the United States Agency for International Development or taking aim at diversity and equity training programs funded by the Department of Education. As was the case when he abruptly axed jobs at Twitter after buying the social network in 2022, the layoffs have been messy at times. Some federal employees have been informed twice that they've been fired. Musk allowed that mistakes may have been made and said that he'd just reverse some cuts. Another flag: One of Musk's allies accidentally gained ability to make changes to a sensitive Treasury Department payment database. Musk is hardly working alone. Trump advisers are reportedly examining whether the Treasury Department can absorb the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, The Wall Street Journal reports. Staff members at the bank watchdog are bracing to hear from Musk's cost-cutting team. Markets prepare for Wednesday's inflation reading. The Consumer Price Index report, set for release at 8:30 a.m. Eastern, is expected to show that efforts to bring down inflation remain stalled, with the 12-month headline reading at 2.9 percent. Citing a strong economy and the sticky inflation, Jay Powell, the Fed chair, told the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday that the central bank was in no hurry to lower interest rates — a position that's bound to aggravate the White House and frustrate investors. A.I. exuberance vaults Chinese tech stocks into a bull market. The rally is being led by Alibaba, with the e-commerce giant's shares jumping more than 8 percent on Wednesday after the company reported progress on its artificial intelligence partnership with Apple. Also, the carmaker BYD announced that it was developing a self-driving feature for its low-cost electric vehicles that would be powered by DeepSeek, a Chinese chatbot maker; shares in Tesla sank on that news. Goldman Sachs is the latest Wall Street firm to back away from D.E.I. The company said it would shelve a quota that compelled boards to include women and members of minority groups. Other banks are curtailing efforts to recruit Black and Latino employees amid a wider corporate pullback from diversity, equity and inclusion efforts as the policies have come under assault by the Trump administration. The next stage of the A.I. race is on After all the discussions and declarations made at this week's A.I. summit in Paris, one thing is clear: The global race in artificial intelligence is kicking into a higher gear. Previous international gatherings focused in large part on safety. This time, political and business leaders made clear that a primary goal is to harness the technology's economic benefits. Here are the top takeaways. Governments and investors are opening the money spigot. President Emmanuel Macron of France pledged €110 billion (about $114 billion) to bolster his country's A.I. industry, while the broader European Union committed €200 billion for an initiative that includes funding for so-called gigafactories to help train A.I. models. And private investors, led by the venture capital firm General Catalyst, announced the A.I. Champions Initiative for the European Union, which calls for investing €150 billion over the next five years. Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, a General Catalyst managing director, said that the project, which was announced with 60 corporate partners, had already drawn interest from more than 230 potential new members. 'There's a very, very high sense of urgency,' she told DealBook's Michael de la Merced. It represents a mental shift for Europe in particular, zu Fürstenberg said. 'The reflex mechanism Europe has had is, 'Oh, there's Stargate, we've lost,' she noted, referring to the ambitious and expensive OpenAI-led project championed by President Trump. Now, according to zu Fürstenberg, the European Union recognizes that it needs to think big and build credible rivals to the likes of OpenAI. 'We need to make champions,' she said, and described the prevailing attitude: 'We want to play to win.' Where that leaves global cooperation on overseeing the technology is unclear. The United States and Britain refused to sign a statement from the summit pledging an 'open,' 'inclusive' and 'ethical' approach to developing A.I. That's perhaps unsurprising, given Vice President JD Vance's declaration that America would lead and that Europe was at risk of strangling its efforts through overregulation. — President Trump has already pushed out or fired top government officials, some of whom were spearheading investigations, lawsuits or enforcement actions against Elon Musk's companies. Here's a look at which of the agencies pursuing Musk have been affected. The fallout from the S.E.C.'s climate retreat A lot of companies hated the climate disclosure rule adopted by the S.E.C. last year. The agency received more than 24,000 comments on the rule, with environmental advocates arguing that the requirements could help investors hold companies accountable for their contributions to climate change and business trade groups accusing the S.E.C. of overstepping its authority. Officials from Republican-controlled states and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce sued to stop the law, and the S.E.C. agreed to delay the rules from going into effect during the litigation. Now it seems unlikely that the rule will go into effect at all. On Tuesday, the acting chair of the S.E.C., Mark Uyeda, said he was directing the agency to effectively kill the rule. Though that might look like a win for big corporations, which grumbled about the difficulties of calculating certain kinds of emissions, most large companies are still subject to impending climate disclosure rules, DealBook's Sarah Kessler reports. California has two major climate disclosure laws scheduled to take effect in 2026. They will require large companies with operations in the state to disclose climate-related financial risks and greenhouse gas emissions, including so-called Scope 3 emissions, which are produced by suppliers or consumers of a company's products. Climate disclosure bills similar to the California laws were recently reintroduced in New York. The European Union also passed a climate disclosure law that affects U.S. companies. Last year, the bloc began carrying out a law that requires the largest American companies operating in Europe to disclose climate-related data, including Scope 3 emissions. The bottom line: Large companies may still be on the hook for reporting climate data, Shivaram Rajgopal, a professor at Columbia Business School, told DealBook. Still, 'investors might demand disclosure,' Rajgopal said. Even though U.S. asset managers have backed off from doing so, he added, 'European funds are still quite vocal in asking for such data.' A Trump critic's new legal perch Neal Katyal, who has built a reputation as one of President Trump's most prominent legal critics, has a new job in which he can challenge the government. Katyal will join the international law firm Milbank, where he'll lead its appellate practice and is likely to battle the Trump administration, DealBook is first to report. His hiring will likely be watched by the nation's largest law firms as they try to navigate the tricky politics of this moment. The tl;dr on Katyal: He was acting U.S. solicitor general during former President Barack Obama's first term, and he previously served in the Justice Department. Since leaving government, he has taught law at Georgetown University and worked as a partner at Hogan Lovells, where he led the appellate practice once headed by John Roberts, now the chief justice. Katyal has argued 52 cases, a significant number for those who have presented cases before the court. He has also argued more cases than any minority lawyer in U.S. history, breaking a record held by Thurgood Marshall. Katyal has spoken out repeatedly against Trump policies, including via frequent appearances on TV: 'He will lose in court every day of the week,' he said of Trump's immigration plans on MSNBC in November. He's also a prolific presence on social media, where he has challenged a plan to end birthright citizenship. Prominent New York law firms have started up Supreme Court practices in recent years, moving into territory that was previously the province of Washington rivals. Among those that have jumped in are Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and Sullivan & Cromwell. But what does Katyal's hiring mean for Milbank and for corporate clients, which have included Bristol Myers Squibb and Nvidia? Politics has become an increasingly fraught matter for lawyers, with Elon Musk on Tuesday calling out firms that have challenged Trump policies. (Separately, Sullivan & Cromwell is now representing Trump in his appeal on the New York hush money case.) Deals Politics, policy and regulation Best of the rest
