Google co-founder Sergey Brin personally called an employee to stop him from quitting and joining OpenAI

Google co-founder Sergey Brin personally called an employee to stop him from quitting and joining OpenAI

Ever since ChatGPT was launched in November 2022, the tech world has been busy talking about generative AI. Time and again, various tech experts have said that the future will be all about AI and the emerging technology will also create new job opportunities. Major tech giants like Google, Meta, Microsoft and even Apple are spending billions on AI development. Some companies are even hiring for AI roles quite actively.

In such a scenario, it is safe to assume that AI talent is very much in demand. Perhaps this is why, Google co-founder Sergey Brin personally called up an employee when he was about to quit the tech giant and join OpenAI.Â

According to a report from The Information, Brin reached out to an employee of the company personally when the latter was thinking of joining OpenAI. Brin reportedly offered more money to persuade the employee to stay in their job during the call. The report further added that the publication got the details from a “longtime AI researcher,” who was a friend of the employee.

In 1998, Brin teamed up with Larry Page to create Google, but he left his role as Alphabet’s president in 2019. Despite stepping down, he’s still on the board and owns a significant share in the company. Now, he’s reportedly back at Google to boost its presence in the highly competitive AI market.

Brin, who is not often seen in public, was recently making headlines for talking about the company’s generative AI tool Gemini.Â

While speaking at San Francisco’s AGI House earlier this month, Brin told a group of people testing Gemini that he came out of his retirement as the trajectory of AI is quite exciting.

“We definitely messed up on the image generation,” Brin said and added that according to him, the whole scenario happened due to a lack of testing. “It, for good reasons, upset a lot of people,” he said.

Talking about what happened with Gemini, Google found itself in the middle of a controversy when the AI chatbot was accused of being racist and “too woke” by several users across the globe. Gemini, out of the blue, started refusing to generate images of white people and depicted several historical figures as people of colour, even though they were originally white. This had sparked a debate online and the AI tool received a lot of flak. As a result, Google had paused Gemini’s abilities to generate images of human beings.Â