Eric Schmidt deleted Stanford interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f6XM6_7pUE

by zniturah • 2 years ago

171 132 2 years ago

youtube.com

metadat2• 2 years ago

Why was it deleted?

Are there non-youtube hosted copies out there, perhaps an archive.org or torrent link?

Spartan-S63• 2 years ago

From what I understand, it’s over the controversy in his statement about Google losing competitive advantage because they chose work life balance over in-office collaboration.

ozten• 2 years ago

I guess the humble-brag about being a registered arms dealer was just a bonus

HashiramaInc• 2 years ago

I feel like that was not that big of a deal. I mean was it a bad thing to say for multiple reasons? sure. But its still a good hour of content and no one says perfect things all the time.

thrdbndndn• 2 years ago

Genuine question: what would be the refutation of this opinion, if any?

Out of options like "Google are not actually losing", "Google are losing but not because they chose work life balance", "Google are, indeed, but so be it", etc.

brewdad• 2 years ago

The it’s good, actually, to steal others IP. If you get caught later, the lawyers will fix it bit also probably wasn’t his finest message.

Maxious• 2 years ago

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220658/google-eric-schm... https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/16/24221353/eric-schmidt-say...

JKCalhoun• 2 years ago

Yeah, that was the part that caused me to sit up — you can steal music and get away with it if no one uses your app.

Oh, your app is popular? Hire lawyers, they'll clean up your mess for you.

Move fast, steal things, lawyer up.

shombaboor• 2 years ago

it was too truthful from what I can ascertain. Always interesting when you get to hear what someone actually thinks. Most tech talk/interviews are access / pr fluff.

zniturah• 2 years ago

Full transcript is available on GitHub: https://github.com/ociubotaru/transcripts/blob/main/Stanford...

metadat2• 2 years ago

I also created a mobile-friendly version of the transcript:

https://gist.github.com/sleaze/bf74291b4072abadb0b4109da3da2...

And here's the related submission:

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's Leaked Stanford Talk - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263143 (2 days ago, 466 comments)

Edit: Broken gist link fixed. Thanks @ryanwhitney!

ryanwhitney• 2 years ago

Your first link is missing a character, so it 404s.

Working link: https://gist.github.com/sleaze/bf74291b4072abadb0b4109da3da2...

otteromkram• 2 years ago

https://archive.ph/RPQie

labster• 2 years ago

It’s now banished from the internet, just like pictures of Barbara Streisand’s house.

the_black_hand2• 2 years ago

Listened to the first few mins. Did he say anything controversial in the? The part about Google work-life balance isn't that big a deal. It's no secret that startups grind more.

aaomidi• 2 years ago

Googlers used to regularly work 50-60 hours. You did have the teams that had a decent WLB, but it was generally the non public facing stuff.

Google’s WLB ironically got significantly better after the layoffs. No one cared about the company anymore.

jordanb• 2 years ago

Funny that pretty much describes the company I work for. People would work their asses off. Pull all-nighters, work through holidays, etc. Then the rounds of layoffs started happening and now nobody cares at all about the company. Everyone just does the minimum while planning their next thing.

xyse53• 2 years ago

This. I worked hard at Google for years because I was pationate about my projects and my colleagues. Then over the past few years especially starting around dragonfly and maven we started getting more of an us vs them culture pushed down from the top. Layoffs were the end for me. I didn't exactly quiet quit but I toned it down and only worked on what I absolutely felt like.

Then jumped over to a startup where we work hard but in a much more organic and empowering way. People come in when it makes sense.

proc0• 2 years ago

I'm surprised Eric Schmidt would do this. A celebrity or someone who doesn't know tech, ok, but this guy? c'mon bro.

ShakataGaNai• 2 years ago

That's exactly it though, these CEO's are so divorced from reality that they forget. Schmidt knows how silicon valley really operates. Because he's probably been involved in a lot of this shitty corporate behavior.

hiddencost2• 2 years ago

Eric Schmidt has always sucked he negotiated the compensation fixing scheme https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

Large Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263143

neilv• 2 years ago

Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41275073

gorgoiler3• 2 years ago

Brynjolfsson: ”I asked Sundar [about Google losing the initiative]. He didn't really give me a very sharp answer.
Schmidt: 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. I'm sorry to be so blunt, but the fact of the matter is if you go found a company and compete against the other startups — like [we did] in the early days of Google — you're not going to let people work from home and only come in one day a week.”

It’s pretty cack-handed to publicly talk about your successor like that. While the WFH part of this got a lot of press I wonder if the free-wheeling side-swipe at Sundar Pichai had more to do with the cringe backpedaling.

Also, the humblebrag about his medal!… he’s an investor!… he showed Sam Altman his calculations that OpenAI will need lots of electricity!… he’s an investor!… he wrote a report setting national AI policy that was “only about 752 pages long”!… he’s an investor!

Schmidt has done some amazing things and his achievements will eclipse many others but I do wonder if even he feels a bit of the post-FAANG blues where one misses the glory days of ones peak, over performing and telling everyone about it to show you’ve still got it.

nextos2• 2 years ago

Lots of great startups have remote teams so this argument by Schmidt is pretty weak. Google is hybrid, not even remote. Also, I don't think that well motivated and engineers work or produce less while WFH. It could be the opposite. Less interruptions are key, as explained in Peopleware. But bad managers love controlling people in open plan offices.

Regardless, I found it surprising Schmidt didn't talk about other stuff that differentiates startups. Smaller teams, a lot less red tape, a lot more ownership, less politics... Google should really follow Steve Jobs 2011 advice to Page about focus. Breaking down into a conglomerate was a great idea to bring focus and agility, but it has not been fully executed and lots of the different resulting entities seem dysfunctional.

gorgoiler3• 2 years ago

Interestingly, re: red tape, Schmidt has been quoted from this same talk as saying if you get caught stealing IP then just “hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up, right?”

kamaal• 2 years ago

>I don't think that well motivated and engineers work or produce less while WFH.

Thats the whole problem isn't it. Years back I was involved in a project(not WFH), like everyone worked at office. But the manager/lead was sort of a totally disengaged person. He would sit in a conf room all day. And come up with some weird things about freedom to work the way people liked.

There was no ticketing system, the code repo had no real commit and PR rules, no stand ups, no bug tracking, no feature backlog, nobody measuring how the project was going, and if it was even making progress. Only real visible thing about progress was a odd demo every now and then. To make things worse, there were two senior engineers who seem to make their own power structures and bully people into doing whatever they wanted. The project folded quickly enough of course.

Sure if every one was motivated and organised enough, things could have been better. But most people are not. And if people aren't engaged enough they just do whatever they want, or even worse do nothing.

If you are keeping lights on in a project, and have lots of old employees things do work fine with remote work. I think building things quickly, especially big things quickly, does require close 1-1 collaboration, and engagement. I don't think its too much to ask. Sometimes thats just how things work.

zooq_ai• 2 years ago

can you name successful remote-only startups? Yes, I know gitlab, others?

tialaramex• 2 years ago

you're not going to let people work from home and only come in one day a week

Huh, I guess I dreamed the first start-up I worked for (a couple of decades ago) where indeed I only came in one day a week.

Yes of course you "work like hell". We had a nasty leak bug and I set things up so that day or night if the leak was detected my stereo would go maximum volume and play "Straight Outta Compton". How does commuting count as "working like hell" ?

If I'm sat in a car (and once a week I often was) then I'm not working am I? I am useless for several hours each day we do that. Maybe sometimes the CTO (who is in the car, he's driving, he worked from home too) is discussing relevant technology, you know design of our secret sauce schema-less database engine, IP stuff - but then it's also possible we're discussing the album that's playing, or a video game we both enjoyed, or a novel we're both reading.

panarky2• 2 years ago

People who sit in their cars an hour every morning, stressed by traffic and pollution before they even set foot in the office, who then attend back-to-back meaningless meetings and email and slack, and then get back in the goddamn car again for another hour if they're lucky, think everyone who doesn't perform this unhealthy and destructive ritual is a slacker.

inferiorhuman3• 2 years ago

  If I'm sat in a car

There are other ways to commute. Commuting via train gave me a chance to go for a walk through parts of the city I'd otherwise not spend a lot of time in. Being stuck in suburban hell currently, working 100% from home is a nightmare scenario for me. Asshole neighbors. Constant noise (far worse than e.g. Oakland). Shit infrastructure (electric, telecom, whatever).

And, in my experience, collaboration almost always suffers. One coworker used to work 100% from his man cave but also refused to invest in getting decent WiFi coverage down there.

  then it's also possible we're discussing the album that's playing, or a
  video game we both enjoyed, or a novel we're both reading.

So? Even though HN has a hard on for eliminating human interaction, socialization is important.

That said, Schmidt is wrong to pin Google's failures on remote work. Pichai is a fucking moron and Google's toxic culture is destroying both their ability to put out competitive products and to keep anything around long enough to get meaningful market share.

ldjkfkdsjnv• 2 years ago

I took this more as Schmidt being disappointed in what Google has become. He really did build Google, its completely valid for him to be mad about the state of the company culture wise.

makeitdouble• 2 years ago

But he also was the "adult in the room" that basically destroyed whatever moral core Google had as a startup.

It might have the been the correct move from a business standpoint and there was no way they'd keep "don't be evil" as a compass, but Eric Schmidt was there to push it all over the edge. The company's current PR issues[0] is perfectly seeded in his contribution to the company.

[0] PS: not counting the company potentially broken up a few years down the line.

dangus7• 2 years ago

Or maybe mad that he wasted his life having no work-life balance and then realizing that lots of companies with work-life balance are productive and profitable.

I’m ordering something from Europe where the factory is shut down for the entire month of August. I just have to wait an extra month for that item. The company still gets my money because I need the item.

I also use a piece of software written by a European company. I will get no releases/patches this month. But that software company still got my money. I need/want the software.

I wonder how many hustle culture US tech founders find out that a lot of Europeans just don’t work at all for a whole month and finally start questioning some of this bullshit.

Clearly, not enough have come to their senses.

ChuckMcM2• 2 years ago

Eric has a penchant for saying things he thinks before thinking about how they might be heard. He famously said, "There is no privacy, get over it. If you're not doing anything wrong you don't have anything to worry about."

dlg• 2 years ago

Wasn't that Scott McNealy? (Though, if I recall your bio from previous HN posts, you'd know far better than me.)

toomuchtodo• 2 years ago

https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/billionaires-and-the-evolution...

1024core• 2 years ago

I asked Sundar [about Google losing the initiative]. He didn't really give me a very sharp answer.

Correction: this statement was made by the interviewer, Erik Brynjolfsson, and not Schmidt.

gorgoiler3• 2 years ago

Thank you, I’ve updated my quotes.

PostOnce2• 2 years ago

At some point, someone is going to realize that people are not going to slave away for the privilege of living in a rental and drinking meal replacement shakes because they're too busy to eat.

People who worked at Google early on were always going to get rich, people who bust ass for Google now might wake up to a 10,000 man layoff in the morning.

/me shrugs

grugagag• 2 years ago

Then somebody younger will happily do it until they too have the same realization. Then another batch.

rodgerd2• 2 years ago

Imagine my complete surprise that the guy in charge of Google when sex with subordinates was rampant, and who gave an exec who was sacked for sexual harassment a ninety million dollar parachute, is upset that there aren't more people in the office.

llm_trw• 2 years ago

Google did to AI what Bell did to magnetic recording: retarded it's progress for decades because they were afraid it would harm their main product.

For those that don't know:

In early 1934, Clarence Hickman, a Bell Labs engineer, had a secret machine, about six feet tall, standing in his office. It was a device without equal in the world, decades ahead of its time. If you called and there was no answer on the phone line to which Hickman’s invention was connected, the machine would beep and a recording device would come on allowing the caller to leave a message.
Soon after Hickman had demonstrated his invention, AT&T ordered the Labs to cease all research into magnetic storage, and Hickman’s research was suppressed and concealed for more than sixty years, coming to light only when the historian Mark Clark came across Hickman’s laboratory notebook in the Bell archives.
AT&T firmly believed that the answering machine, and its magnetic tapes, would lead the public to abandon the telephone.

https://gizmodo.com/how-ma-bell-shelved-the-future-for-60-ye...

The same thing was true for google, with the very real threat that something like perplexity will eat their lunch by having a monthly payment and no adds. With google relegated to a second tier API endpoint.

20 years of AI advancements were used for better add targeting in gmail, and in the months after chatgpt came out, a better spell checker.

Brajeshwar• 2 years ago

I have a question out of curiosity: Has anyone or anything ever succeeded in deleting/removing anything from the Internet once it goes up?

I’ve realized that anything that goes online will be (perhaps unintentionally) leaked, hacked, uncovered, archived, altered, restored, referenced, and what not.

jarsin• 2 years ago

It's a publicity trick. See The Kardashian's.

freeopinion• 2 years ago

What is Google supposed to win at? Being the most popular search engine? Being the highest grossing ad agency? Having the highest average salaries? Selling the most used cars? Curing cancer? Owning more generators than anyone else? Contributing money to youth groups? How do we judge whether Google is winning?

panarky2• 2 years ago

In our system, winning == market capitalization.

congulio• 2 years ago

Really fascinating to see such a mix of blind spots, insecurity and, yet, good insights on full display here. It’s almost as if he’s a normal human being at the end of the day, despite his circumstances.

pierrefermat14• 2 years ago

The biggest difference between him and a "normal smart person" is they realize they have blind spots and choose not to publicly spout opinions on them.

jdross• 2 years ago

By definition people are not very aware of their blind spots

Unknown• 2 years ago

techolic• 2 years ago

To me that is still the case of power corrupting people. If you are surrounded by positive feedback all along, you loose some of that self-awareness.

spacemadness2• 2 years ago

It’s almost as if what he says carries more weight due to his status and he should be more careful in what he says publicly, especially if it’s charged. He deserves the flogging he’s getting.

fuzztester• 2 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt

See the "Public positions" section of the above article.

zombiwoof• 2 years ago

Schmidt hit the lottery when Larry and Sergei picked him

1oooqooq2• 2 years ago

investors and board piqued him. to babysit Larry and Sergei (that's a literal quote from the announcement)

mattigames2• 2 years ago

The rich get richer and the poor do the best they can.
The fact of the matter is this is a rich country's game, right?

You heard it straight from the wolves mouth folks, don't act surprise when they bite.

keiferski4• 2 years ago

This answer was responding to a question about smaller countries competing against China, the US, and larger countries in AI. “The rich” here refers to the richer countries, not people in general.

Please read/listen to the link before commenting on out of context sections.

mattigames2• 2 years ago

Nothing is out of context, I know exactly the context before posting it here and I did include the full quote "It's a rich _country's_ game".

keiferski4• 2 years ago

It will be interesting to see if Schmidt’s comments about the future of AI being mostly a China-US game will come true, or if less powerful models will ultimately be more useful than single centralized powerful ones.

The analogy here might be between nuclear weapons and drones; the former are controlled entirely by a small number of countries, but the latter probably have more of a direct role to play in the future of warfare - and yet aren’t costly or difficult to make at all. The assumption tends to be that the most powerful well-capitalized tech always wins, but I don’t think that is necessarily the case.

flawn• 2 years ago

Check Leopold Aschenbrenner's work out - he introduced this to the public through AI Safety

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40576466

keiferski4• 2 years ago

That’s a pretty big PDF - can you point me to the part where he talks about what I’m talking about?

habosa• 2 years ago

Eric ran Google while the Android team often worked 7 days a week in office (famously: “bacon Sundays”) and still managed to blow every advantage they had over iOS by making repeatedly terrible strategic decisions.

But yeah, he’d have won AI by keeping butts in seats…

wunderlust• 2 years ago

"The country is going to have to learn critical thinking. That may be an impossible challenge for the US." (ts 30:57)

"Impossible" is a bold qualifier. Maybe he was exaggerating - maybe not. Will critical thinking necessarily become more difficult - to learn, teach, exercise - with AI? It's possible it will help people become better thinkers, but I don't think that's a guarantee.

mikewarot• 2 years ago

At about 39 minutes in, he's asked if efforts analogous to seti at home can be used to get around the scaling problems with training the next round of big models.

He gives a strongly NVidia oriented answer that I happen to think is dead wrong. Pushing more and more GPU/Memory bandwidth into more and more expensive packages that are obsolete after a year or two isn't the approach that I think will win in the end.

I think systems which eliminate the memory/compute distinction completely, like FPGA but more optimized for throughput, instead of latency, are the way to go.

Imagine if you had a network of machines, that could each handle one layer of an LLM with no memory transfers, your bottleneck would be just getting the data between layers. GPT 4, for example, is likely a 8 separate columns of 120 layers of of 1024^2 parameter matrix multiplies. Assuming infinitely fast compute, you still have to transfer at least 2KB of parameters between layers for every token. Assuming PCI Express 7, at about 200 Gigabytes/second, that's about 100,000,000 tokens/second across all of the computing fabric.

Flowing 13 trillion tokens through that would take 36 hours/epoch.

Doing all of that in one place is impressive. But if you can farm it out, and have a bunch of CPUs and network connections, you're transferring 4k each way for each token from each workstation. It wouldn't be unreasonable to aggregate all of those flows across the internet without the need for anything super fancy. Even if it took a month/epoch, it could keep going for a very long time.

jl2718• 2 years ago

I think you need higher algorithmic intensity. Gradient descent is best for monolithic GPUs. There could be other possibilities for layer-distributed training.

nirui• 2 years ago

This thing just gets repeatedly uploaded, I guess deletion is not that useful now.

Put that aside, Eric Schmidt did told the truth (maybe except AI and NVidia stock thing) and offered the public a glace of how things actually work within the industry.

One important thing he mentioned was (after simplified) "just steal, and deal with justice later", which actually mirrors what Steve Jobs once said "Great artist steal". This should remind everyone, that if you want to have significant achievement in this industry, you at least needs to guard against thefts, because there WILL BE (maybe ALREDY are) people who comeout with a "be shameless or be dead" mindset after been educated by people like that man.

(Also, I found it quite funny that one of Eric's girl friend has probably took his lesson too)

kkfx• 2 years ago

Few notes:

- Alphabet have made a switch from a (mostly) tech-driven company to a pure finance-driven one, when this happen you can expect a bit of growth, even a sharp one for a little time, than an inexorable decline;

- the more and more centralized web means search engine became dysfunctional beasts try to pour water to specific mill instead of being open search and for a company living on search more than anything else it's a problem, of course there is GMail a project born when Google was tech-driven, but again GMail is search, so Drive, and in that "specific domain" they have substantial competitors and they can't have innovation being financially-driven now;

- LLM-push a way to reach a kind of dummy semantic holy grail of research while very popular is a substantial failure. Yes it have a certain wow-effect, but results are such low quality that the wow effect will not last longer and current "better-than-Alphabet" competitors in that field still have to see any meaningful and durable growth and profit.

Long story short the anti-remote-working is just another droplet in a substantially lost PR/élite battle to force people in the city, the sole way they have to remain alive because finance and services can only live at large city scale where they own anything and they rent/sell services to anyone. In a spread world they simply die killed by SME innovation and personal ownership that value substantial innovation against services.

IMVHO the big-tech model, a cleptocracy born out of Xerox tech once they have found a way to make it anti-user, is at it's end. I do not know what could happen next because so far ALL élites want such model to rule slaves, and we have lost much of intelligence, competence of the Xerox time, and no one else in the world seem to be there, China included, who was able to surge as an industrial power but still lag behind in software, even in the current sorry state of IT. But it's clear that the service model of big tech is dead. Or they found a way to reinvent or they are done.

1oooqooq2• 2 years ago

it's funny how both threads here on hn, the top comments focus on his quote badmouthing work life balance.

when anyone with half a brain can see that work life balance has much less impact on a tech company than replacing the tech founders with the likes of him and a sea of business major middle Managers...

bartimus• 2 years ago

And it got removed

Eric Schmidt deleted Stanford interview

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