Posted by iancmceachern 1/1/2026
Google co-founder Sergey Brin on leaving retirement to work on AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37226292 - Aug 2023 (25 comments)
Back at Google Again, Cofounder Sergey Brin Just Filed His First Code Request - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34645311 - Feb 2023 (16 comments)
Additionally, I could see myself going back to work at a company if I saw a truly exciting project. But that excludes around 98% of the jobs I see out there.
No, the next generation of privacy management experiences that will impact billions of users configuring their privacy settings isn't interesting.
Good advice though, it really felt like a good point in my career to move on somewhere new.
There are various ways to look at numbers but my thumb rule is 4% inflation 9% growth keeps you perennially happy with some choppy years of course. 4% inflation 9% growth implies you can withdraw 4-5% every year and still have equivalent portfolio in inflated money.
Five years ago I paid for “market rate“ insurance through my business for my family because we did not qualify for ACA subsidies. The cost was about $40,000 per year.
I said "Yes! If you don't mind that all the balls land on the floor."
Sergey found someone else to juggle with.
That person became CEO of a major Alphabet company.
Work feels pretty stifling to me.
That is exactly what I do now. Every question I've ever had I now have the time to devote to answering it. I take classes, I volunteer, I mentor Comp. Sci. students. But, more than anything, I still write code. I spent the last few months creating an LLM from scratch which was incredibly fun.
That said, I have a friend who will probably work until he dies. His only real interest in life is his job. I'm not suggesting that is a bad thing; its more to the point that "retirement" isn't a panacea for everyone.
Stephen Hawking, Einstein, Marie Curie, and Linus Pauling never retired. Did they not "truly live"?
It's pretty cool doing whatever I want for now, but I don't think I can do this for another 40 years. I feel like there's something missing - the sense of accomplishment whenever I finish a task. Also, sitting around doing nothing feels so much better when it's either before work or after work.
So maybe at the end of summer 2026 I'll wait for recruiter emails and start responding to some of them. I'm done with applying to 100 jobs to get one response. Maybe I'll try a startup job to experience working in a place that doesn't have a 50-page document describing level expectations.
I don't think I un-retired but I'm performing some commercialy valuable tasks for someone.
So just decided to get a motorbike license and go check out Asia.
Ended up finding a partner (totally unexpected) selling everything, moving abroad, marrying them and now expecting a child (planned), all in a manner of 3 years.
Has been quite the joyful and interesting experience, all after I had the deeply depressing feeling of having “solved life” at my nice position in the EU.
There are so many places in the world where you can feel you are actually doing great service to the community, on a shoestring budget and feel happy and fulfilled.
This comment reminded me of a book I read recently - Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anne Lembke. She talks about how pleasure and pain and experienced by the same region of the brain and they need to be balanced. I'd highly recommend reading that book.
Google has made some subtle moves that a lot of folks missed, possibly with Sergey's influence. Like hiring back Noam Shazeer, who practically invented the backbone of the technology.
It's good to have folks with presumptions of being scientists actually run companies for once.
That being said, I wish his ex-wife hadn't spent her millions in the divorce proceedings to get RFK Jr into a cabinet level position to gut billions in research spending. :(
Whats the quality difference between default ChatGPT and Thinking? Is it an extra 20% quality boost or is the difference night/day?
I've often imagined it would be great to have some kind of chrome extension or 3rd party tool to always run prompts in multiple thinking tiers so you can get an immediate response to read while you wait for the thinking models to think.
I use Thinking and Pro. I don't use the default ChatGPT so can't comment on that. The difference between Thinking and Pro is modest but detectable. The 20 minute thinking times are with Pro, not with Thinking. But Pro only allows 60k tokens per prompt so I sometimes can't use it.
In the $200/month subscription they give you access to a "heavy thinking" tier for Thinking which increases test time compute by maybe 30% compared to what you get in Plus.
I guess it's not talked about as much because a lot fewer people have access to it, but after spending a bunch of time with gemini 3 and opus 4.5 I don't feel that openai has lost the lead at all. The benchmarks tell a different story, but for my real world use cases codex and gpt pro are still ahead. Better at sticking to my intent and fewer mistakes overall. It's slow, yes. But I can't write requirements as quickly as opus can misunderstand them anyway.
For a while people couldn't see how Google could catch up, either. Have a bit of imagination.
In any case, I welcome the renewed intense competition.
Today's unscientific gutting of the CDC's childhood vaccine schedule is what is being accomplished with all that $GOOG money.
It's honestly very disturbing and rather than discuss it as a matter of politics, I'll just say that as a parent I'll be following the AAP's vaccination recommendations (even if their recommendations on baby sleep are impossible :)
If you put yourself in their shoes, you realise that you have to give advice for the 10-20th percentile parents (or worse) because you are giving the same advice to everyone.
The alternative would be to offer more complex advice such as "if X Y and Z then do A, if only X do B", but the perception is that's too difficult for people to follow.
So you end up making very defensive (and therefore onerous) recommendations.
An interesting fact is that, since the introduction of the "baby sleeps on their back, alone", SIDS has gone down, but flat heads have gone up. It's probably been a good tradeoff, but it's still a tradeoff.
Also, I've seen a second time mother refer to "don't cosleep" advice as "western nonsense" which I found funny because it puts things in perspective - vast swathes of the world think cosleeping with your child is safe, natural and normal.
I wouldn't want 60-hour weeks of dealing with a lot of promotion-seekers, though.
I wonder how different Google would be if they'd just paid people enough money they didn't have to think about money, but it was the same amount of money to everyone. You do the work, not for promotions, but because you like doing the work. You can train up for and transfer to different kinds of roles, but they pay the same.
* You like the craft.
* You want to be there for your team.
* You like that your financial needs are taken care of, so that you don't have to think about that.
* You like that everyone else's financial needs are taken care of, because you want everyone to be happy.
* You like that there's alignment by everyone on this. (Even though there will be disagreements on, say, how best to accomplish the mission.)
If someone gets in and doesn't actually have or find motivations like that, or doesn't rise to the occasion despite help, I guess they'd be managed out. That cultural mismatch wouldn't be good for anyone involved.
You answered your question by yourself: the company has to prevent these morons from getting in.
That solves half of the problem of typical work dynamics already; the second half, preventing unqualified morons from getting in and setting themselves up for life by being paid good money for doing nothing, would need to be solved in some other way.
There are so many things worth doing in so many areas that pinning your whole weekly life on a single one is just an immense waste.
Cap the time that a company gets to have from you, and achieve so much more.
Alphabet has effectively monetized the world economy and gained outsized influence on policy, and Brin has about 25% of voting shares on the company
His money is on advocating that people widely forfeit a right acquired by labor movements in the early 20th century, and through his ex, on public-sector scientific research becoming unviable
This amounts nakedly (if fortuitously) a further consolidation of power and capital in the hands of a powerful few
(In my head at 2am, I was (wrongly) taking that as a given, understood by everyone, and then remarking on a tangent from there. About the implications of 60hr/wk at Google specifically. And then going from there, about how maybe it didn't have to be like that. Moot for Google in reality, but it makes a good example for what-if thinking or daydreaming about how we'd like the next good tech employer to be.)
There seems to be much less hallucination of facts than in other tools I've tried and whenever Gemini makes assumptions on stuff I didn't explicitly specify in the prompt, it says so. The answers also always have nice structure: it starts with a short and concise version, then gives me options and more details and considerations.
I also like the feature that I can make it remember facts across chats. I'm a physicist by training and I've told Gemini so, so now every time I ask something, it gives me an answer perfectly tailored for a physicist (often with mathematical formulas, etc.).
This is another account created after widespread access to LLM was available to the public that is pushing a political view that is somewhat coherent until pressed and then it falls apart like all chat bots
Maybe it’s a real person and I’m being an asshole here, but it’s hard to tell.
The fact that is hard to tell if they are real or not means we need to come up with a heuristic to identify actual humans now that passing the Turing test has become trivially cheap.
The site guidelines are clear on this: you should assume that it's a real person and try your best to reel back these sorts of accusations, which are nearly always wrong, and nearly always driven by differences of background and (therefore) opinion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm rushing out the door just now but here are a couple of past explanations about this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851 (May 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41948722 (Oct 2024)
(as well as https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... of course)
If you have the time, two podcasts from this doctor which I think kind of highlight what's going on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OF6vP-SkGA (where they have a frank discussion about what was done badly during COVID, including government lies)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBllzAb_vAk (where they have a discussion with one of the leading researchers on nutrition, who has come into direct conflict with RFK Jr. because he doesn't say exactly what RFK Jr. believes to be the case, and has had papers censored and funding cut as a result)
I was initially trying to make a point that the ideological lines that people have drawn have made it so they automatically think RFK is anti-science and they as a consequence have a whole host of assumptions for which I don't even blame them if they haven't spent time reading up about it. I apologize for not countering every single point and going to covid but it's kind of worth pointing out that RFK a) raises some very substantive charges against Fauci for frankly war criminal like actions throughout his unfortunate history of practicing medicine and b) it wasn't "mismanagement". They did, seriously, the opposite of good practice (both accepted good practice and what was discovered in 2020 going forward) in just about every case
If you're not sympathetic to that then of course you're going to disagree and you might think that the only reason someone like Musk bought X (and please don't think this is me Musk fanning, I dislike him for several reasons) is just to have a joyride (which is still possible); they used to ban so many people and real doctors for information that they didn't like and it was a serious problem and if they could do that for covid then they also did it for other things
Edit: (see, I do know how to edit comments) here's it on Youtube which is the highlights https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jMONZMuS2U
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: perhaps this will help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41948722. More at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
I haven't read RFK's book and even if every single fact in that particular book was true (which I very highly doubt), it wouldn't change anything he's done in the last year that involved gutting American medical research, spreading misinformation about vaccines that's debunked within their own "research", and coming up with the absolutely genius idea of "tell doctors to tell patients to eat better" to "fix" American's illnesses. Oh, and telling people to eat fried food as long as its fried with beef tallow. That's really dumb.
He's an utter and complete moron at best, and the only reason that people (like you presumably) listen to him is because of his last name.
So even if you were right about COVID, what you just wrote isn't a rebuttable to anything I said. Though I suspect you know that.
It's almost like your response is dishonestly trying to muddy the waters.
He's probably not developing the low-level algorithms but he can probably do everything else and has years of experience doing so.
He's also perfectly able to spend 60 hours a week improving his AI skills using the best teachers in the world.
Exactly what do you think he can't do?
Certainly he's well qualified to manage a team of a few thousand (?) AI people and understand what they are talking about and get the best out of them.
Like Batman he has the superpower of money. If he has gaps he can pay (or otherwise arrange) for someone with those skills to 1-1 coach him in them.
He's not trying to become a top researcher, he's trying to learn enough to understand what they are talking about and be able to make decisions around say what areas should be pursued.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Edit: you've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly and extremely badly:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46470097
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46461928
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460655
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46426226 (Dec 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46425616 (Dec 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46420674 (Dec 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46394806 (Dec 2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46293387 (Dec 2025)
This is such a high proportion of what you've been posting that I think we have to ban the account. I don't want to do that, because it's clear that you know a lot about things that people here are interested in—but the damage caused by these poisonous, aggressive comments is greater than the benefit you've been adding by sharing knowledge.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I also think this doesn't make sense, because he certainly stayed on top of things
Of course maybe your hobbies or your dad’s hobbies are social. when someone says “hobbies” to me I generally think of things done mostly alone and I know for me, that’s not enough
but maybe being in a corporate environment (any any env) shapes your thinking in such a way that it’s really hard to think outside tha conditioning. feels like that to me only a few years int working
Those hobbies, interests etc sounds like middle class thing where people take upon gardening, cooking, hiking, surfing or some such that they couldn't do enough while working. For people like Google founders they would've had any adventure they seek outside work anywhere in they world every weekend.
People forget Bill Gates advised (maybe still consulted) by MS long after he formally moved away from any official position in company.
A man who can pay for the livelihoods of like-minded individuals to work on a common goal sounds like a dream.
FIRE is sick. Go for it as soon as possible, before marriage.
He's not a farmer. Just a farm tool collector.
I try remind myself of this with the Bukowski poem 'air and light and time and space': https://allpoetry.com/poem/14326888-air-and-light-and-time-a...
only a few at a time, of course, maybe only two, and by rotation. and then maybe i would narrow it down to two or three for long term.
would try to make money from a few of them too.