Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt made some controversial remarks in an address to Stanford students, including a suggestion AI startups can steal intellectual property and have lawyers come behind to “clean up the mess”.
The influential figure was taking part in an interview with the group of students with the content uploaded to the university’s YouTube channel, but it was suddenly pulled after several media outlets picked up on the comments.
The video of the event is now private.
In a strong address, Schmidt appeared to rail against Google’s working practices and staffing levels, suggesting the company has been overtaken in some aspects by OpenAI because “working from home was more important than winning.”
The 69-year-old served as CEO of the U.S. tech giant between 2001 and 2011, and was the company’s executive chairman from 2011 to 2015. Earlier this year, Forbes reported he was involved in a clandestine military drone project, while he remains a regular investor in startups.
In a Stanford talk posted today, Eric Schmidt says the reason why Google is losing to @OpenAI and other startups is because Google only has people coming in 1 day per week pic.twitter.com/XPxr3kdNaC
— Alex Kehr (@alexkehr) August 13, 2024
Cleaning up the mess
In the exchange chaired by Stanford’s Erik Brynjolfsson, the subject matter turned to a future world where AI programs could carry out complicated tasks in place of humans, eliciting the following response from Schmidt.
“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.’
That’s the command. Boom, boom, boom, boom.”
Later, Schmidt returned to the TikTok example with a more profound impact.
“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.
“And do not quote me.”
Brynjolfsson then pointed out to the former Google chief that his comments were being filmed on camera, which he appeared to shrug off with a generalized response. He suggested “in other words” Silicon Valley performs these tests and then cleans up the mess depending on the outcome.
The comments generated a lot of publicity and in retrospect, could have been more considered for the setting he was in.
Schmidt later gave an emailed statement to TechCrunch, relaying “I misspoke about Google and their work hours. I regret my error.”
Image credit: VIa Ideogram
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