Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, has found himself in hot waters after suggesting that the company did not anticipate the early rise of ChatGPT and generative AI because its employees prioritised working from home.
“Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning,” Schmidt said in a chat with students at Stanford University in the United States of America. “I’m sorry to be so blunt […] But the fact of the matter is, if you all leave the university and go found a company, you’re not gonna let people work from home and only come in one day a week if you want to compete against the other startups,” he said.
Schmidt’s comments surfaced after a video of the interview was posted on the University’s YouTube channel. The clip was soon taken down at his request, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Speaking about the recent advancements in AI models, the ex-Google chairman said, “If TikTok is banned, here’s what I propose each and every one of you do: Say to your LLM the following: “Make me a copy of TikTok, steal all the users, steal all the music, put my preferences in it, produce this program in the next 30 seconds, release it, and in one hour, if it’s not viral, do something different along the same lines.”
“So, in the example that I gave of the TikTok competitor – and by the way, I was not arguing that you should illegally steal everybody’s music – what you would do if you’re a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, which hopefully all of you will be, is if it took off, then you’d hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up, right? But if nobody uses your product, it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content,” he was quoted as saying by The Verge, adding that Silicon Valley companies tend to launch products and clean up the mess afterwards.