Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has unexpectedly expressed harsh criticism of the company, accusing it of improperly organizing its workflow and losing out in the race for leadership in the AI industry.
Schmidt made his statement during a meeting with students at Stanford University. When asked why Google is lagging behind other players in the AI field, he replied:
“Google has prioritized work-life balance by allowing employees to leave work early and work remotely instead of focusing on winning.”
According to the former executive, “startups thrive because their employees work 24/7.”
He also emphasized that success cannot be achieved without great effort and overtime:
“Sorry to be so blunt, but if you graduate from university and decide to start your own company, you are unlikely to allow your employees to work from home or come to work only one day a week if you plan to compete successfully with other startups.”
As a reminder, back in 2022, Google introduced a hybrid work model, where employees have to be in the office three days a week and can work remotely for two days. However, last year, the company admitted that it monitors office attendance and takes this indicator into account when evaluating performance.
The speaker noted that Google made significant discoveries in the field of artificial intelligence back in 2017, but lost its leadership position. “They seem to have handed over the initiative to OpenAI, and even in the last ranking I saw, Claude from Anthropic was at the top of the list. I discussed this with Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, but his answer was rather vague. Perhaps you have a more accurate or objective version of what’s going on,” Schmidt said.
When asked about copyright infringement during AI training, Schmidt suggested that successful startups may misappropriate other people’s intellectual property and then turn to lawyers to “settle matters.”
“If TikTok gets blocked, I suggest you do the following: give your language model a command to create a copy of TikTok, take over all the users, take all the music, customize it to my preferences, build the app in 30 seconds, release it, and if it doesn’t go viral in an hour, try something else in the same style,” he said.
If you were a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, which you may one day be, you would probably hire a lot of lawyers to deal with legal issues. But what’s the point if no one uses your product, even if you’ve copied someone else’s content completely?” he concluded. The event’s host reminded Schmidt that everything that was happening was being recorded on camera, but he added with confidence that he was only describing the realities of business in Silicon Valley.
Eric Schmidt stepped down as CEO of Google in 2009 and as Chairman of the Board of Directors in 2015. Despite this, he continues to be a prominent figure in Silicon Valley. During one of his speeches, Schmidt mentioned his involvement in investing in the French startup Mistral and working with the US Army in weapons development.
After his words began to spread in the media, the video of the event suddenly disappeared from the university’s YouTube channel. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Schmidt admitted that he had made a mistake in his remarks about Google and his working hours and asked for the video to be removed.