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Google co-founder Sergey Brin says the company could achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) if employees worked harder and were in the office more. "Sixty hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity," he wrote in an internal memo seen by The New York Times.
AGI is a type of AI that matches or even surpasses human cognitive abilities. It can understand and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks like a human, rather than across a limited set of use cases. In the memo sent to employees working on Google's Gemini AI, Brin said: “Competition has accelerated immensely, and the final race to AGI is afoot.”
He added: “I think we have all the ingredients to win this race, but we are going to have to turbocharge our efforts.”
Brin singled out "a small number [of employees who] put in the bare minimum to get by." To him, that means they “work less than 60 hours," which is "not only unproductive but also highly demoralizing to everyone else."
Brin also recommended that employees trek to the office at least every weekday. Google’s official return-to-the-office policy mandates three days a week on-site.
Google’s AI staffers are apparently already familiar with brutal workloads. Google’s search boss, Prabhakar Raghavan, claimed that Gemini staff were at one point putting in 120 hours a week to fix a flaw in Google’s image-recognition tool, according to CNBC.
In January, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he's "now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it,” and that in the next few years, “everyone will see what we see.” That has required some technical staff to work 10-hour days six days a weeks.
Employees at Elon Musk's xAI have also disclosed 12-hour-plus working days. Musk himself has pegged the arrival of AGI at some point in 2026.
The jury is still out on whether AGI is a realistic short-term goal. Gary Marcus, professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University, has critiqued the claims of tech CEOs like Altman, pointing out the numerous technical issues.