Over the past few years, the tech industry has gone from cushy landing pad for STEM grads to a cesspit of corporate greed, where grueling hours are commonplace, and layoffs could strike at any moment.

Unfortunately for employees of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, the squeeze is just getting started.

In an internal memo sent out Wednesday and obtained by the New York Times, Google cofounder Sergey Brin — who's been mostly absent from the company since 2019, except when issuing edicts about the importance of AI — made it clear he wants his peons to focus even harder on developing artificial general intelligence (AGI), the long-promised "next step" in AI intelligence.

"I recommend being in the office at least every weekday," Brin wrote, implying that good employees should also spend a few weekends in the office.

"60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity," Brin added, stating that a "number of folks work less than 60 hours and a small number put in the bare minimum to get by... This last group is not only unproductive but also can be highly demoralizing to everyone else."

Google's current policy only mandates three in-office days, so the boss' memo comes across as a heavy-handed suggestion — especially at a corporation that's been criticized for unfairly distributing performance evaluations, leading to arbitrary layoffs.

The crunch comes after waves of layoffs sent over 13,000 employees packing in recent years. Though Google posted $26.3 billion in profit as recently as last October, it continues to downsize and outsource full-time jobs in a bid to siphon its operating budget into AI development.

To that end, Brin also urged his employees to use Google's own AI model, Gemini, more in their coding efforts, according to the NYT. Which is ironic, given Gemini's history of issues, like the time it told a user that one pound of bricks and two pounds of feathers had the exact same weight.

The haranguing is also a bit rich seeing as ultimately, the goal of AI tech is to replace the very workers building it — assuming it ever gets that far, of course.

"Competition has accelerated immensely and the final race to AGI is afoot," Brin wrote, simultaneously cracking the whip and hyping AI superintelligence, in a familiar register to other would-be AI moguls Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

Should AGI ever arrive, it would have huge implications for labor and the broader economy. The trouble is, despite all the hype promising otherwise, there's little indication developers are actually closing in on the revolutionary tech. In fact, most evidence has instead been pointing toward a slowdown in AI progress.

Though the concept of AGI has been bouncing around for years, it was generally seen as impossible or far-off. That changed when OpenAI released ChatGPT, which went mega-viral and spurred companies like Google to shred billions of dollars chasing the AGI pipe dream to the delight of investors, often at the expense of their workers.

"Why do we need to have the biggest model? What kind of pissing contest is this?" asked Timnit Gebru on a 2023 episode of the podcast Tech Won't Save Us.

Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute — and used to work on Google's ethical AI team, but was sacked by the company after publishing a paper highlighting the environmental, social, and financial risks posed by AI.

"Because [those building AGI are] the loudest, and have the most money right now," Gebru continued, "they also influence any type of AI discourse because they try to make it look as if everything they’re building is that — AGI or has AGI characteristics."

That certainly looks to be the case for Google, where billionaire executives employ vast armies of subcontractors to smooth over the rough edges of its increasingly expensive AI products.

Whether AGI ever arrives or not, we can be sure the promise of it will be highly lucrative for tech moguls like Brin, and an ever-present carrot — or perhaps stick — to be dangled in front of the remaining Google employees desperately clinging to their jobs.

It wasn't immediately clear how many hours a week Brin spends working in his office, as Google didn't respond to a request for comment.

More on Google's labor practices: Something Bad Is Brewing Inside Google


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