In a chat at Stanford College, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt mentioned the way forward for AI, touched on geopolitics, and went on an anti-remote work rant that he later walked again.
He additionally gave college students some questionable recommendation.
In a now-deleted video (he requested for it to be taken down, he informed the Wall Road Journal) Schmidt talked about a enterprise alternative that might come up if the U.S. ever banned TikTok, as lawmakers from each events tried to do earlier this 12 months.
In that scenario, he mentioned, college students ought to use a big language mannequin (LLM) to duplicate this system, utilizing it to “steal” mental property.
“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,” he mentioned.
Scmidt later tried to make clear his ideas on utilizing AI to duplicate TikTok, after which informed the scholars that the whole lot can be fantastic so long as they’d attorneys to type issues out.
“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,” Schmidt mentioned.
Schmidt didn’t instantly reply to Fortune‘s request for remark.
Schmidt’s feedback observe the Silicon Valley mentality of “move fast and break things” that helped make his former firm, Google’s mum or dad Alphabet, some of the helpful on the earth with a roughly $2 trillion valuation.
“In other words, Silicon Valley will run these tests and clean up the mess. And that’s typically how those things are done,” he mentioned.
But, the same technique has additionally landed some AI firms in scorching water. In December, the New York Occasions sued ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, alleging that the businesses educated their AI on tens of millions of its articles. One other eight newspaper publishers sued the corporate in April for allegedly utilizing their copyrighted articles with out permission or cost.
Schmidt has held a number of positions at Google, together with a 10-year stint as CEO, the place he led the corporate by way of the launch of Chrome and Gmail, its acquisition of YouTube, and its 2004 IPO. Now price about $31 billion in line with the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Schmidt is a significant investor, together with in AI firms like France-based Mistral AI.
