after resignation as president of Google's parent company Alphabet in 2019, co-founder Sergey Brin is back at Google — and working on AI “pretty much every day,” he confirmed for the first time in a conversation with Co-founder of the Climate Corporation David Friedberg earlier this week.

In one Fireside Chat at the All-In SummitFriedberg asked Brin about Google's plans for AI, including whether the company intends to focus its efforts on a large, general-purpose AI model, also known as a “God” model.

“If you can build God's model, you're done,” Friedberg said. “There's one thing to rule them all. Or is the reality of AI that there are lots of smaller models that do application-specific things?”

Related: Google's AI overview has changed since its debut, and these websites have benefited the most

Brin said that 10 to 15 years ago, separate AI systems were needed for different tasks. A chess-playing AI, for example, was different from an image-generating AI. Google has historically used smaller AI models like these for specific tasks, and recently even combined three separate models, for theorem proving, geometry and general language. to win a silver medal in the International Mathematics Olympiad.

Although these smaller AI models have been effective, “the trend is to have a more unified model,” Brin said.

“I don't know if I would call God a model,” he said. “But certainly common architectures and ultimately common models.”

^{Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Photo: Lionel Hahn/Getty Images}

Friedberg noted that if shared architectures and models were the future, AI systems would require more computing resources.

Related: New Google report reveals the hidden cost of AI

Brin said that while accelerating AI capabilities would require “a lot” of resources, it may not be easy to predict how much, and current estimates may not take internal improvements into account.

“The algorithmic improvements that have come over the last few years are probably even outpacing the added computation that has been put into these models,” Brin said. He later added that, “For us, we're building the calculations as fast as we can. We just have a huge amount of demand.”

Google's cloud customers want resources like specialized processors to train AI. According to Brin, Google has had to turn away customers because they don't have the resources to meet the demand.

Related: Former Google CEO says company fell behind AI rivals due to remote work. Now He's taking it back.

Meanwhile, Google launched a number of public-facing AI products, including Overview of AI in Search. AND overview for products like Gmail and Docs. On Tuesday, the state of Nevada announced it will launch an AI system powered by Google to recommend either unemployed workers in the state get benefits.

Learning from Failure

Brin acknowledged that not all of Google's AI efforts have been successful. In a conversation in March, he said that Google “definitely confusedThe launch of his Gemini image generator, which produced historically inaccurate images.

Now he says it's important to take AI out and take risks — even if it means embarrassment.

“Is this something magical we're giving the world?” – asked Brin. “I think as long as we communicate it properly – like look at this thing is amazing – and periodically we're going to get things really wrong, then I think we should put them in and let's let people experiment and see what new ways they come up with to use it.”

Related: Google Pulls Gemini AI Commercial Olympics After Backlash