Ex-Google CEO says successful AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to ‘clean up the mess’

Former Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt has made headlines for saying that Google was blindsided by the early the rise of ChatGPT because its employees decided that “working from home was more important than winning.”

The comment was made in front of Stanford students during a recent interview, video of which was removed from the university’s YouTube channel after Schmidt’s gaffe was widely picked up by the press. I managed to watch most of Schmidt’s chat with Stanford’s Erik Brynjolfsson before it was taken down, however, and something else he said stands out. (You can still read the full transcript here.)

While talking about a future world in which AI agents can do complex tasks on behalf of humans, Schmidt says:

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.

A bit later, Schmidt returns to his TikTok example and says:

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And do not quote me.

At this point, Brynjolfsson points out that, “You’re on camera,” to which Schmidt responds:

Yeah, that’s right. But you see my point. In other words, Silicon Valley will run these tests and clean up the mess. And that’s typically how those things are done.

While Schmidt stepped away from his chairman role at Google in 2015, he remains influential in Silicon Valley and a prolific investor in startups. During this same talk at Stanford, he touts his investment in the AI startup Mistral and being “a licensed arms dealer” to the US military. He also calls Sam Altman “a close friend,” and recalls a recent dinner he had with Elon Musk while praising what the Tesla CEO “gets out of people” who work for him.

I emailed Schmidt and Brynjolfsson requesting comment about the removal of their chat from YouTube and haven’t heard back yet. Schmidt earlier told The Wall Street Journal that he “misspoke about Google and their work hours” and requested the video be taken down.