When Sergey Brin co-founded Google as a Stanford Ph.D. student, he never imagined that the company would become so wide-ranging and successful.
He certainly never imagined that he’d be onstage at the World Economic Forum, where founder Klaus Schwab would tell him that “the prime minister of quite an important country” recently called Alphabet (Google’s parent company) one of the four powers left in the world.
Despite Alphabet’s global dominance, Brin modestly attributes much of his success to luck. He said he was in Silicon Valley, where multiple technological revolutions (semiconductor, internet, mobile) have occurred and where a culture of both experimentation and social responsibility prevails.
“If I told you all of the dumb things I did, we’d have to have a much longer session,” Brin said. “And the successes, they often are chance.”
This serendipitous perspective also defines Brin’s view of humanity and business in the future, as he explained in a talk at the World Economic Forum earlier today. Brin began with a caveat about his ability to predict the next technological frontier.
“You maybe should doubt my answers a little bit,” he told the audience. Brin then shared an anecdote: A few years ago, he underestimated and largely disregarded Google’s research into artificial intelligence, believing that the concept of “neural nets” had been proven infeasible back in the 1990s. Today, Google Brain, the company’s AI research division, touches nearly all of the company’s projects.
Brin encourages…