Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said he “misspoke” at a Stanford University talk when he said that remote work was to blame for Google falling behind in the AI race.
In a video posted on Tuesday to YouTube by Stanford’s School of Engineering, which has since been taken down at Schmidt’s request, professor Erik Brynjolfsson said that Anthropic, not Google, was at the top of AI leaderboards. Anthropic’s Claude was named the best-performing AI model in a ranking released last month by AI evaluation company Galileo.
Brynjolfsson then asked Schmidt to explain why Google “lost the initiative” in AI to its rivals.
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Schmidt, who was CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, responded by saying, “Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.”
“The reason startups work is because the people work like hell,” he said. “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.”
As of April 2022, months ahead of OpenAI’s November 2022 ChatGPT release, Google required that most workers come into a physical office at least three days a week. The company has since been tracking office badges and adding attendance to employee performance reviews.
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An internal Google HR memo last year also showed that the average salaried Google employee works longer than eight hours a day.
After the talk went viral, with more than 40,000 views in a little over a day, Schmidt asked for it to be taken down. He told The Wall Street Journal in an email on Wednesday that he “misspoke about Google and their work hours.”
“I regret my error,” he wrote.
Eric Schmidt. Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images
The Alphabet Workers Union, which represents employees at Google and other Alphabet companies, responded to Schmidt’s comments on Wednesday.
Flexible work options aren’t to blame for slowed-down work, the union stated.
“Understaffing, shifting priorities, constant layoffs, stagnant wages and lack of follow-through from management on projects – these factors slow Google workers down every day,” the union wrote in an X post.
Schmidt is worth $31.4 billion and is the 54th richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
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