9 ms·
Eric Schmidt deleted Stanford interview
- metadat 2y agoWhy was it deleted? Are there non-youtube hosted copies out there, perhaps an archive.org or torrent link?
- Spartan-S63 2y agoFrom 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 2y agoI guess the humble-brag about being a registered arms dealer was just a bonus
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- HashiramaInc 2y agoI 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 2y agoGenuine 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.
- dylan604 2y ago"Google isn't losing as we're not playing the same game of releasing a chatbot. We're working on something much bigger". They'd just have to do it
- coreload 2y agoGoogle is no longer a startup. Google is competing for a significant number of talented people. The startup mentality will not easily work for decades of competition with the other wealthiest tech companies.
- pknomad 2y agoI'm not a googler, but my take would be that Google was a smaller ship with technical founders at the helm who understood the problem and acted accordingly with first mover benefits. I remember when I started to use search engines in grade school (AskJeeves, AltaVista, etc) and Google just had the most relevant answers. Google is now a behemoth that seems to just chuck money and promo packets at problems (Stadia, Google Cloud, Nest, etc) with no clear vision for them. It kind of reminds me of the examples in this blog: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 There's also self selection going on - people joining startups generally have more vested interest in solving a problem and will work longer and harder, too. So I think there's some kernel of truth what Eric Schmidt was saying. How much enthusiasm can a person have about increasing the bottom line of a mega public company?
- dangus 2y agoI don’t think startup aficionados and hustle culture members realize that the world runs on C-players. You’re right, startup people have a drive to build great things and they burn the midnight oil and they get divorced during the development of the original iPhone, etc. But the people who keep the lights on at most companies especially big ones like Google are a sea of average, steady, stable employees who do their tasks and not much else, go home at 5 or maybe earlier and have no interest in burning themselves out so that the CEO can have a second private jet. And you don’t want to run your company on all A-players and 10x developers because once the thing is built they’ll get bored and move on to the next thing, or they’ll hit a mental breakdown and rage quit because they’re the bulb burning brightest. Those C-players will just keep clocking in, they won’t be poached by more attractive places to work, they won’t be difficult to cover for when they go on leave, and they won’t write code that goes over the head of other C-players. Technically, a developer at a public company should work harder to boost the stock price because they’re getting shares as compensation. But at the same time, making 5% more in stock value isn’t worth working 50% harder. I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with the culture at Google. People who wish Google would be exciting again like Schmidt are just grasping at nostalgia. Boring business may be boring but boring business is excellent business.
- 2y ago
- hiddencost 2y agoSmall company gets big, gets taken over by MBAs who all hire McKinsey to help themselves take over more of the company. The people at the top become professional ladder climbers, eventually too much of the leadership got their for the wrong reasons and the company is unable to insulate themselves from corporate's bad decisions. Kinda like Goodheart's law but for promotion criterion. The number of fairly senior people I've encountered who spend their whole career presenting things that have never been built as if they exist is exhausting.
- wodenokoto 2y agoGoogle always advertised their workplaces as fun. They pioneered the table tennis at work meme. So it’s odd for them to blame work life balance, when they have always pushed their work place as more fun, colorful and relaxing than other work places.
- brewdad 2y agoThe 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 2y agohttps://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220658/google-eric-schmidt-stanford-talk-ai-startups-openai https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220658/google-eric-schm... https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/16/24221353/eric-schmidt-says-the-quiet-part-out-loud https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/16/24221353/eric-schmidt-say...
- JKCalhoun 2y agoYeah, 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.
- rodgerd 2y agoThat describes YouTube's path to becoming the online video monopoly.
- shombaboor 2y agoit 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 2y agoFull transcript is available on GitHub: https://github.com/ociubotaru/transcripts/blob/main/Stanford_ECON295%E2%A7%B8CS323_I_2024_I_The_Age_of_AI%2C_Eric_Schmidt.txt https://github.com/ociubotaru/transcripts/blob/main/Stanford...
- otteromkram 2y agohttps://archive.ph/RPQie https://archive.ph/RPQie
- metadat 2y agoI also created a mobile-friendly version of the transcript: https://gist.github.com/sleaze/bf74291b4072abadb0b4109da3da21ac 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263143 (2 days ago, 466 comments) Edit: Broken gist link fixed. Thanks @ryanwhitney!
- ryanwhitney 2y agoYour first link is missing a character, so it 404s. Working link: https://gist.github.com/sleaze/bf74291b4072abadb0b4109da3da21ac https://gist.github.com/sleaze/bf74291b4072abadb0b4109da3da2...
- labster 2y agoIt’s now banished from the internet, just like pictures of Barbara Streisand’s house.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- the_black_hand 2y agoListened 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- aaomidi 2y agoGooglers 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 2y agoFunny 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 2y agoThis. 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.
- the_black_hand 2y agoTo me startups just inherently have a bigger carrot at the end of the stick. being an early engineer in a successful startup can bring life-changing money. In a 1T company with 100,000 of engineers it just isn't possible to have that incentive. your best work is often a drop in the ocean that some VP will shelve at the fist sign of trouble. Yeah working weekends can get you that promotion quicker and give a salary bump, but it's not the same as watching the company IPO and becoming an engineer overnight.
- proc0 2y agoI'm surprised Eric Schmidt would do this. A celebrity or someone who doesn't know tech, ok, but this guy? c'mon bro.
- ShakataGaNai 2y agoThat'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.
- hiddencost 2y agoEric Schmidt has always sucked he negotiated the compensation fixing scheme https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoLarge Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41263143
- neilv 2y agoAlso: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41275073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41275073
- gorgoiler 2y 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.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 2y agoI 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 2y agoBut 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.
- dangus 2y agoOr 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.
- renewiltord 2y ago[flagged]
- Brajeshwar 2y agoI 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 2y agoIt's a publicity trick. See The Kardashian's.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- freeopinion 2y agoWhat 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?
- panarky 2y agoIn our system, winning == market capitalization.
- f4gg0tz2 2y ago[flagged]
- congulio 2y agoReally 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.
- pierrefermat1 2y agoThe 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 2y agoBy definition people are not very aware of their blind spots
- enneff 2y agoBut the people that we should listen to are.
- pierrefermat1 2y agoThere is a difference between knowing if a blind spot exists vs knowing what in the blind spot. I.E. taking a driving lesson and learning that there's a blind spot in your rear view mirror
- deleted 2y ago
- techolic 2y agoTo 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.
- spacemadness 2y agoIt’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 2y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt See the "Public positions" section of the above article.
- zombiwoof 2y agoSchmidt hit the lottery when Larry and Sergei picked him
- 1oooqooq 2y agoinvestors and board piqued him. to babysit Larry and Sergei (that's a literal quote from the announcement)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mattigames 2y 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.
- keiferski 2y agoThis 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.
- mattigames 2y agoNothing 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".
- keiferski 2y agoAgain, the question was about competition in the ecosystem, not some kind of class warfare thing. He was describing the reality of it, not making a justification. He then went on to describe how other places aren’t allocating the resources that China and the Us are. The way you framed it, which implies that you didn’t actually watch the video, is that Schmidt was making a comment justifying the rich dominating the poor. It was no such thing.
- keiferski 2y agoIt 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 2y agoCheck Leopold Aschenbrenner's work out - he introduced this to the public through AI Safety https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40576466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40576466
- keiferski 2y agoThat’s a pretty big PDF - can you point me to the part where he talks about what I’m talking about?
- habosa 2y agoEric 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 2y 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 2y agoAt 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 2y agoI think you need higher algorithmic intensity. Gradient descent is best for monolithic GPUs. There could be other possibilities for layer-distributed training.
- nirui 2y agoThis 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 2y agoFew 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.
- 1oooqooq 2y agoit'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 2y agoAnd it got removed