Google co-founder Sergey Brin recommends 60-hour work week for “productivity”

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has recommended that employees who are working on Gemini come to the office every weekday and clock in 60 hours of work every week in order to hit “the sweet spot of productivity,” The New York Times reported, citing an internal memo.

Brin stressed on the need for employees to go full-speed ahead in order to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) and win the race for a level of AI development that will match or surpass human intelligence. The Google co-founder also called on employees to use Google’s own AI tools for coding.

In his memo, he pointed out that many employees do not work for 60 hours a week and criticised those who did the “bare minimum” at work. Brin’s comments are not a company-wide directive, reported the outlet.

The comments come as Google’s leadership works to understand how to take back the lead in Generative AI development from OpenAI. ChatGPT was released months before Google’s glitchy Bard chatbot, later rebranded as Gemini.

However, the 2025 arrival of DeepSeek’s R1 model shook the U.S.-based AI industry as a whole, as the Chinese company’s model was reportedly developed at a fraction of the cost of its rivals while matching them across machine learning benchmarks.

DeepSeek has also offered developer access to its model at highly competitive, discounted rates.