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Transcript of Sergey Brin’s Interview At All-In Live from Miami

The following is the full transcript of Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin’s Interview at All-In Live from Miami, May 20, 2025.

Returning to Google During the AI Revolution

INTERVIEWER: You’re punching a clock, man. I hear the reports. You and I have talked about it. You’re going to work every day.

SERGEY BRIN: Yeah, it’s been, you know, some of the most fun I’ve had in my life, honestly. And I retired like a month before COVID hit. In theory, yeah. And I was like, you know, this has been good. I want to do something else. I want to hang out in cafes, read physics books. And then like a month later I was like, that’s not really happening.

So then I just started to go to the office, you know, once we could go to the office and actually, to be perfectly honest, there was a guy from OpenAI, this guy named Dan, and I ran into him at a little party and he said, you know, look, what are you doing? This is like the greatest transformative moment in computer science ever, completely.

INTERVIEWER: And you’re a computer scientist.

SERGEY BRIN: I’m a computer scientist.

INTERVIEWER: Forget that you founder of Google, but you were a PhD student for computer science.

SERGEY BRIN: I haven’t finished my PhD yet, but working on it.

INTERVIEWER: Keep working, we’ll get there.

SERGEY BRIN: Technically on leave of absence.

INTERVIEWER: Right.

SERGEY BRIN: And he told me this, and I’d already started kind of going into the office a little bit, and I was like, you know, he’s right. And it has been just incredible. Just. Well, you guys all obviously follow all the AI technology, but being a computer scientist, it is, you know, the most exciting thing of my life, just technologically.

The Unprecedented Pace of AI Development

INTERVIEWER: And the exponential nature of this, the pace dwarfs anything we’ve seen in our career. It’s almost like everything we did over the last 30 or 40 years has led up to this moment. And it’s all compounding on itself the pace. Maybe you could speak. You know, you had a company, Google, that grew from, you know, 100 users and 10 employees to now you have over 2 billion people using, I think six products or five products have over 2 billion. It’s not even worth counting because it’s the majority of the people on the planet touch Google products. Describe the pace.

SERGEY BRIN: Yeah, I mean, the excitement of the early web. Like, I remember using Mosaic and then later Netscape. How many of you remember Mosaic actually, Am I a weirdo? And you remember there was a what? A what’s new page.

INTERVIEWER: The what’s new page.

SERGEY BRIN: Right. Like you go to a page, two.

INTERVIEWER: Or three new web pages again.

SERGEY BRIN: Yeah. It was like in this last week. These were the new websites.

INTERVIEWER: Yes.

SERGEY BRIN: And it was like such and such elementary school, such and such a fish tank.

INTERVIEWER: And you were like Michael Jordan depreciation page.

SERGEY BRIN: Yeah. Whatever it was, these were the three new sites on the whole Internet. So obviously the web developed very rapidly from there. And that was very exciting. And then we’ve had smartphones and whatnot.

But the developments in AI are just astonishing, I would say, by comparison, just because of, you know, the web spread, but didn’t technically change so much from, you know, month to month, year to year. But these AI systems actually change quite a lot. Quite a lot. You know, if you went away somewhere for a month and you came back, you’d be like, whoa, what happened?

Getting Back into the Code

INTERVIEWER: Somebody told me you started submitting code and it kind of freaked everybody out that daddy was home.

SERGEY BRIN: Okay, you need a PR. What happened? The code I submitted wasn’t very exciting. I think I needed to like, add myself to get access to some things and, you know, a minor CL here or there, nothing, nothing that’s going to win any awards. But, you know, you need to do that to do basic things, run basic experiments and things like that.

And I’ve tried to do that and touch different parts of the system so that, you know, I. So that first of all, it’s fun and secondly, I know what I’m talking about. It really feels privileged to be able to kind of go back to the company, not have any real executive responsibilities, but be able to actually go deep into every little pocket.

INTERVIEWER: Are there parts of the AI stack that interests you more than others right now? Are there certain problems that are just totally captivating you?

SERGEY BRIN: Yeah, I started, you know, like sort of a couple years ago and maybe a year ago I was really very close with what we call pre-training. Actually most of what people think of as AI training, whatever people call it, pre-training for various historical reasons, but. But that’s sort of the big super. You know, you throw huge amounts of computers at it and I learned a lot, you know, just being deeply involved in that and seeing us go from model to model and so forth and running little baby experiments, but kind of just for fun. So I could say I did it. And more recently the post-training, especially as the thinking models have come around and that’s been another huge step up in general in AI. So we don’t really know what the.

Deep Research and AI Capabilities

INTERVIEWER: Ceiling is when you explain what’s happening with prompt engineering then to Deep Research and what’s happening there. So like a civilian, how would you explain that sort of step function? Because I think people are not hitting the down carrot and watching Deep Research in Gemini’s mobile app.