In a moment both ironic and endearing, Sergey Brin—the billionaire co-founder of Google and one of the most powerful figures in tech—recently found himself in an unlikely tussle within the very empire he helped build. At the All-In podcast’s live recording in Miami, Brin shared a candid and humorous story that has since sparked fascination across Silicon Valley: he had to fight Google just to allow the use of its own AI model, Gemini, for coding.
Brin revealed that during a recent internal review, he discovered that Gemini—Google’s flagship generative AI—was inexplicably listed under technologies not allowed for internal coding. “You couldn’t vibe code on the Gemini code piece,” he said with bemusement, reflecting the dissonance of a company building cutting-edge tools while simultaneously banning them internally.
The restriction, buried deep within an internal webpage, baffled Brin. “It boggled my mind,” he said, shaking his head. What followed was a “big tiff,” a drawn-out and uphill battle against a faceless company policy that had seemingly outgrown even the reach of its own founder.
The kicker? Even Brin—worth over $140 billion, one of the top ten richest people in the world—had to escalate the matter like any frustrated employee, pleading with higher-ups to fix a policy that made no sense. “I talked to [my boss] and said, ‘I can’t deal with these people, you need to deal with this.’” The experience, he said, left him “beside himself.”
The tale took a satirical turn when Brin remarked on the surrealism of facing bureaucracy in a company he co-founded. “It’s pretty amazing that some junior muckety-muck can basically look at you and say, ‘Hey, go f*** yourself,’” he quipped, drawing laughs from the podcast audience and a fair share of incredulous headlines in tech circles.
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