Richard Nieva

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google. Corbis via Getty Images As the battle in artificial intelligence technology heats up between Silicon Valley companies, Google cofounder Sergey Brin is getting hands-on again with software code, after years of day-to-day absence. On Jan. 24, Brin appeared to file his first request in years for access to code, according to screenshots viewed by Forbes. Two sources said the request was related to LaMDA, Google’s natural language chatbot—a project initially announced in 2021, but which has recently garnered increased attention as Google tries to fend off rival OpenAI, which released the popular ChatGPT bot in November....

Illustration by Gracelynn Wan for Forbes In 2016, a few months after becoming CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai made a sweeping proclamation: Google, whose name had become synonymous with search, would now be an “AI-first” company. Announced at Google’s massive I/O developer conference, it was his first major order of business after taking the company reins. What AI-first meant, exactly, was murky, but the stakes were not. Two years earlier, Amazon had blindsided Google by releasing its voice assistant Alexa....