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However, within less than 24 hours, he was criticized so much that he deleted the video and apologized.

"Google's decision to embrace work-life balance, leaving earlier and working remotely, trumped the competition," Schmidt said. "And when it comes to startups, they succeed because people are working their asses off."

In a Stanford University open course video released on Wednesday, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked why Google fell behind. OpenAI At last the gun fired.

“I’m sorry to be so blunt, but here’s the thing: if y’all were leaving college to start a company, you wouldn’t let your employees work from home if you wanted to.”

These remarks quickly caused an uproar.

Google, which has produced a large number of cutting-edge AI technologies, has always been regarded as the "Huangpu Military Academy" in the field of artificial intelligence. Today, the infrastructure of most generative AI models is Transformer A famous paper from Google in 2017. An earlier wave of deep learning that made the world aware of AI also gradually began around 2012 after Google Brain's "AI Recognition Cat" research.

However, in ChatGPT In the wave of changing the entire technology field, Google's position seems a bit awkward. In the past year or so, we seem to have gotten used to this technology giant appearing as a "follower".

AI big models are an unprecedented opportunity in the technology field, and in the face of opportunities, Google's strategy has always been to follow and benchmark. People are criticizing Google's direction, talent and system, and even its aggressiveness. It's no wonder that in an open class of CS 323 at Stanford University, a university professor would ask Schmidt such a question.

Is “only one day a week” the biggest reason why Google is falling behind?

One netizen commented: If you just want a job, just work from home. But if you want a career, please work on-site.

Some people objected: people coming here does not mean they are working. In recent years, everyone’s experience has proved that anyone who is focused can work anywhere and increase efficiency by 200%.

Many netizens were also skeptical about this. One person joked: I thought they didn't even have time to go to the office once a week.

Some people also want to expose: I know a buddy who is a top programmer at Google. But he now has three jobs, all full-time, and only spends two hours a day on Google work.

In sharp contrast is OpenAI's "Volume".

Jason Wei, the author of Thought Chain and working at OpenAI, quoted a young OpenAI engineer at almost the same time: "Why am I doing well now? I don't think it's because I'm smarter or more experienced than others, but because my competitive advantage is that I'm willing to sit down and debug thoroughly and fully understand the code. I'm willing to stay up all night to get the work done, no matter how long it takes. This is all voluntary, and I'm not afraid of any project built from scratch, because I know I can do anything."

The tone of Jason Wei's comments was different, and it resonated with many netizens, who said, "This is the way to win."

“Many successful engineers I know have similar stories behind them. Instead of blindly completing the projects at hand, they are willing to spend a lot of time delving into them.”

It's hard not to think of Jason Wei's "996" schedule at OpenAI, where a day at OpenAI starts at 9:45 and lasts 12 hours without stopping until 1 a.m.

Although this work intensity made many foreign netizens exclaim: "How terrible, where do you find the time to sleep?"

The most frightening thing is that these "geniuses" carefully selected by OpenAI are all willing to work overtime. But this may be a vivid footnote to what Schmidt said in his Stanford speech: "Startups succeed because the people there work very hard."

Regardless, the incident was so outrageous that Eric Schmidt recently retracted his comments. "I made a mistake regarding Google and their approach to work schedules," Schmidt said in an email to The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. "I regret my mistake."

The video, which was posted on YouTube by Stanford Online after the speech, had been viewed more than 40,000 times by Wednesday afternoon, and has now been removed from the platform, making it available only to the author of the video.

In fact, for most of the video, Schmidt discussed the future of large model technology. He believes that by next year, AI models will unify three key pillars: ultra-long context windows, agents, and text-to-action. We can't predict what impact it will have, but soon everyone will have a lot of agents to command.

Google and OpenAI have both implemented similar return-to-work policies since the pandemic. However, starting in 2022, both companies will require employees to work in the office at least three days a week. At the same time, Google also emphasized the benefits of a hybrid work system. Google said it would contact employees who did not show up less than three days a week to remind them that they needed to come to work face-to-face.

Schmidt joins a long list of high-profile entrepreneurs who dislike work-from-home policies. They include JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who have criticized work-from-home policies, arguing that they make companies less efficient and less competitive. Dimon said a few years ago that "seniors can't lead a company just by sitting at a desk or behind a screen," and Musk said that "employees need to be in the office at least 40 hours a week."

Schmidt's speech at Stanford

"Flexible work arrangements will not slow down our work progress," the Alphabet Workers Union said."What really hinders Google employees from being productive every day is understaffing, constantly changing priorities, frequent layoffs, stagnant wages, and a lack of follow-through from management on projects."

According to the annual report, Alphabet (Google's parent company) had about 182,000 employees at the end of last year. The company has also encountered challenges in getting employees back to the office, such as some employees saying that their commute is too far or that they have elderly people and children at home who need to be taken care of. In some cases, employees object to the mandatory requirement to return to the office.

Eric Schmidt is one of the "Big Three" who founded Google, the other two being Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Schmidt served as CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011. He stepped down as executive chairman in 2018 and left the Alphabet board in 2019, but he remains an Alphabet shareholder.

He co-founded Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic investment organization with his wife, to fund scientific and technological research. He is also the chairman of the Special Competitive Studies Project, a US nonprofit organization that focuses on supporting the development of technologies such as artificial intelligence.

Google has been on the defensive in the field of AI since OpenAI launched ChatGPT at the end of 2022. Earlier this year, Google released Gemini, which was criticized for "causing a lot of trouble". Not only did it generate racial bias in portraits, but it also recommended that everyone eat a stone a day and use glue to stick cheese on pizza.

Although Google released an enhanced version of Gemini yesterday and launched the voice assistant Gemini Live that competes with GPT-4o, Gemini Live still had a minor "failure" during the demonstration. The camera recognition function failed in the first two attempts, and it was not successful until the third time when it changed the phone.

At yesterday’s Made by Google event, Gemini Live failed during the demo session.

This isn’t the first time Google has failed to demonstrate a large model. When Gemini debuted in December 2023, the demo video showing Gemini’s native multimodal capabilities was edited. In the video below, Gemini seems to be able to determine in real time that it is playing “Rock, Scissors, Paper” based on gestures, but this video only shows the result, editing out the process that guides Gemini’s judgment.

The staff first showed Gemini three pictures of single gestures and asked it what it saw respectively. Then they sent all three pictures of gestures to Gemini and asked it what it was doing and told it that it was a "game". Through the above step-by-step prompts and guidance, Gemini finally gave the answer: you are playing "Rock, Scissors, Paper".

After being questioned, Google admitted that the demo was fake.

The recent rapid development of the technology field has really made the founders of Google anxious. Last year, there was news that Sergey Brin, who had retired for many years, had returned to the front line and started writing code himself. Schmidt's appeal at Stanford University also had a sense of regret. However, it is certain that Google is gradually seeking to take the initiative from the inside out.

Will the already hot competition for large models become even more intense?

References:

https://fortune.com/2024/08/14/google-eric-schmidt-working-from-home-ai-openai/

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/google-eric-schmidt-ai-remote-work-stanford-f92f4ca5

https://x.com/alexkehr/status/1823480786349383879

https://x.com/_jasonwei/status/1823067805748728051