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Sergey Brin said ‘60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity’ in the message to employees who work on Gemini
Google co-founder Sergey Brin stressed that Google employees should use more of AI for coding as improvement in AI would lead to Artificial Generative Intelligence. (File Photo: AFP)
Google co-founder Sergey Brin sent a memo to his employees, who are working on Gemini AI models, to devote at least 60 hours in a week and be present in office every day.
Brin’s stern warning to employees come as the AI race gets narrower, with Google trying to reassert itself as an AI pioneer.
“I recommend being in the office at least every weekday,” he wrote in a memo posted internally on February 26, as 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 AI models and apps.
Brin criticised employees who were not meeting this expectation, stating, “A number of folks work less than 60 hours and a small number put in the bare minimum to get by. This last group is not only unproductive but also can be highly demoralising to everyone else.”
He also called on employees working on Gemini to be “the most efficient coders and AI scientists in the world by using our own AI.”
How 60 Hours Work Week Will Improve Efficiency
Brin’s note highlighted that the competition in Artificial Generative Intelligence (AGI) could be won. And it explained how he believes Google could achieve that technological leap.
“Competition has accelerated immensely and the final race to AGI 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 stressed the need for Google employees to use more of AI for coding, saying the improvement in AI would lead to AGI.
A similar push was seen by other tech companies in India. Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy suggested a 70-hour workweek last year, arguing that young professionals should work longer to boost the country’s economic growth. In January, Larsen & Toubro (L&T) Chairman SN Subrahmanyan took it even further, and proposed a 90-hour workweek.
However, long working hours have faced criticism from many industry and health experts.
When people work more hours, there’s often a diminishing return, John P. Trougakos, a professor of management at the University of Toronto told Business Insider. Spending a lot of time on the job can lead to an increase in errors and a drop in motivation.
Capgemini India’s CEO, Ashwin Yardi, recently weighed in on the debate, suggesting an ideal workweek of around 47.5 hours — far below the 60, 70, or even 90-hour weeks proposed by some executives.
Is Google Changing Return-To-Office Policy?
Google employees are required to work in office for three days a week. However, Brin’s memo does not seem to make any change to the current return-to-office policy.
In September, Amazon said its corporate employees must return to the office five days a week starting in 2025. AT&T, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs have also reversed hybrid-work policies.
How Much Have Google, Microsoft, Meta Invested In AI?
The AI market size is projected to reach $243.7 billion this year and is expected to show an annual growth rate (CAGR 2025-2030) of 27.7%, resulting in a market volume of $826.7 billion by 2030, according to Statista. In global comparison, the largest market size will be the United States ($66.2 billion in 2025).
By 2025, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon alone are expected to invest a combined $255 billion in AI. To put that into perspective, Microsoft is nearly doubling its AI spending, jumping from $41.2 billion in 2023 to $80 billion in 2025. Google is going even further, increasing its investment 2.3 times from $32.3 billion to $75 billion. Meanwhile, Amazon is set to shell out a whopping $100 billion, more than doubling its 2023 investment of $48.2 billion.
Who Is Winning The AI Race?
With AI landscape evolving every day and AI being expensive, companies are offering cost-effective models.
Google, which has traditionally been popular with smaller-sized companies, has its own strength in the cloud AI race. Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro is the most affordable model, costing just $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens, far cheaper than competitors like GPT-4 and Claude 3.5. This affordability could give Google a major advantage in AI adoption.
In terms of efficiency, DeepSeek R1 stands out, leading in English, coding, maths, and reasoning. It scores an impressive 97.3 in maths and 71.5 in logic, outperforming even OpenAI’s models, as per IND Money financial company.
As per IOT Analytics, when compared with new cloud AI case studies against overall cloud cast studies, Microsoft has a clear lead and might remain so in the near term. Microsoft backed OpenAI in 2019, and in January 2023 (less than two months since ChatGPT became publicly available), it expanded with big investments in AI, making the Azure OpenAI service generally available.
AWS or Amazon Web Services is the leader in terms of traditional cloud AI (i.e., cloud AI case studies without a GenAI element), as per IOT Analytics. Coinciding with this, AWS’s Amazon SageMaker—an AI/ML platform—was the most included product at 21% of cloud AI case studies.