Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's Leaked Stanford Talk

Google was loosing on many fronts

i believe this trend is a result of management culture and performance metrics that attempt to measure "impact", and correlate pay and promotions along those measures.

It's the same reason why google products die when they don't reach mega-success (thus products getting killed off in spades recently).

Nobody wants to be doing maintenance on projects started by somebody else - so as soon as the lead visionary leaves for better pastures, that project gets languished, and whoever takes over it cannot use it to generate promotion worthy impact.

dart lost to typescript on web >angular lost to react >tensorflow looks like currently loosing to pytorch - seems like google got bored and more development is for JAX, Keras wrapper

Google seems to have a deep-seated distrust for programming language theory, as well as a deep-seated distrust for its users. This combination produces awkward software and APIs that ignore modern PLT and take a "Google knows best" approach.

Meta is the most leetcode heavy interviews for SWEs, they expect you to solve 2 leet code questions in every coding round.

Considering that in Meta I heard (from friends) it is/was easier to work remotely and even easier to get into (they are less leetcode oriented)

This is a weird take. It might pertain to 2020 during Covid when Meta encouraged remote working, but it's not like that anymore. Interviews were always leetcode focused so nothing changed there.

Meta is an interesting comparison because the performance culture has historically been way tougher than Google (sans Covid years). It's quite a shock for a lot of Xooglers who join. One Xoogler at Meta who told me they only used to work 4-6 hours a day at Google. That is basically impossible in Meta - you have to constantly prove your value and the perf bar is high.

I think Google is changing now though and I wouldn't be surprised at all to see them adopt Meta/Amazon style perf cultures in the future.

Source: I work at Meta, and have close friends at Google.

Tensorflow losing has nothing to do with Google getting bored -- it's vice versa.

Tensorflow is a symbolic framework, which is less intuitive to work with for most people than the Pytorch. Not to mention the errors Tensorflow generates are more annoying to debug (again more an issue with the fact that it's symbolic than any lack of effort on part of Google)

Google tried to fix it by introducing an eager mode in Tensorflow but by then it was too late.

All of those examples (except maybe tensorflow, I don't know enough to say for sure) are interesting because they highlight a more "googly" approach to the problems.

Typescript is a superset of javascript, Dart isn't (though it transpiles). Flutter implements its own widgets, react native controls native widgets.

I know nothing about what makes an industry succeed or fail, and also nothing about web tech, but working in the field I can comment on:

tensorflow looks like currently loosing to pytorch - seems like google got bored and more development is for JAX, Keras wrapper

Well, TensorFlow doesn't "look like currently losing", it has already lost since a long time. I haven't seen a decent paper release code in TensorFlow in years, and all the references I see to TF online are job posts from "older" companies (to the point that, if you are looking for a job in data science, seeing TF mentioned in the job post is kind of a red flag of a place you don't want to be).

That said, I am quite certain that this has only a small impact on why Google is losing terrain, and even on why it is behind in AI (which is also debatable: narrative aside, Gemini is not that much lacking behind competitors). Certainly if TensorFlow + TPUs turned out to be better than PyTorch + GPUs they would have had a lead to start from, but if that was so important, Meta or NVIDIA would have created the first LLM, not OpenAI.

Simply, sometimes stuff happens, you can't predict it all.

Meta is less leetcode oriented? I'm shocked to read this. Meta is the poster child for leetcode style interviews. Meta requires you to solve 2 leetcode style questions in 35 mins (out of 45 mins - first 5 mins for initial pleasantries, last 5 mins for asking questions). For each question, you're required to (based on the signals they look for) ask clarifying questions, present a solution to the interviewer, get buy-in, code, verify with test cases - all this in 17.5 mins/question. Go figure! :-)

almost no individual at Google has the fire or drive in them to play to win

Yes, that's why you go to large megacorps. I wouldn't go to Oracle, IBM, Google, Facebook, MS, etc. etc. if I had a "huge fire or a drive to win". Honestly, I go there because I wanna work 5 hours a day (less if possible) and have a stable career.

If I want to work 9-12h a day, give me an upside. None of these huge megacorps will reward that.

If I'm the lead of a Goog project that becomes a hit, do I get $10M bonus? Of course not. I get a pat on the back and something to put in my packet for the next promotion interview.

So you're absolutely right, but the problem is not in people. It's in the way the system's designed.

How can you have "drive to win" if you are just an employee of a company, and have no stake in it?

People love to talk about how capitalism (or free market) solves the tragedy of the commons, but it actually doesn't. The only way to solve it is to make people care about commons by giving them a say in managing it, i.e. socialism.

It's ludicrous to lay this at the feet of individual employees and assert that they're all just lazy with no drive etc.

Google has severe cultural problems and the responsibility for that should be assumed by the leadership.

almost no individual at Google has the fire or drive in them to play to win

No one with such a drive would stay in, or even go to Google, neither any GAFAM-like corp. Those have been the establishment for 10+ years now.

A large corporation cannot seriously pretend to encourage their employees to "play to win" when it is structuring itself against that precisely.

The bigger the corp, the slower, duller and more rigid it becomes _unless_ someone at the CxO level actively fights against it in a opinionated manner (which still doesn't often register well with boards and major shareholders).

It may be sad, it's quasi a law of physics for corporations. If you have that kind of fire in you, go first hunt into to the woods, don't go to the factories.

I think what's hilarious to observe is the transition from "the dream nerd company" to yet another tech hedge fund.

If you are young and you go work at Google, they will beat that fire out of you very quickly.

I don't agree, but there are challenges at Google that don't exist in other large companies.

Google's monorepo along with the 'bottom up' driven culture means that to enact any non trivial change, you need many sign-offs, which means an iron clad design doc, and either you have to be brave enough to make huge disparate changes across other teams codebasse, OR to wait multiple quarters to have respective teams execute.

Sometimes this is awesome, and it means you can do really complex things over the course of a year.

Often, it just means experimenting with non trivial changes takes 3x longer than it would at say Amazon or more silo'd companies.

While Mr. Schmidt was chief executive of Google, he had an extramarital relationship with Marcy Simon, a public relations executive. A decade after they split, things are still messy. John Carreyrou sifted through hundreds of pages of court filings for this article [1].

Yep, he is a great leader! :) /s

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/12/technology/eric-schmidt-a...

Not just one I guess?

https://qz.com/work/1326942/sergey-brin-started-google-with-...

Not really. When I lived and worked in Silicon Valley in the early 2010s, we used to joke that Yahoo! is where you go to retire.

I think Google is starting to become that. It's just the nature of older very large corporations, I suppose. There are places to hide in these companies for non-productive workers.

Absolutely true. The layoffs appear to have been 100% random. Lots of loafers and do-nothing types on my friend's team who did not get laid off, but other people who consistently do great work did get laid off.

There's no incentive to excel. Either you'll get laid off anyway or someone else will take credit for your work.

Might as well just coast. The severance is quite good, so there's not even much motivation to quit, better to wait to be laid off.

My recollection of the vibe at the time was, “Google does everything it can to maximize the amount of effective employee time dedicated to Google.”

I know many people at Google, none of whom I would call an “activist”. They all describe Google as overly bureaucratic. They just happen to be sitting on a money printer internet monopoly.

Yeah, that sounds like winning ...lol

China has no reason to take over Taiwan militarily. They already have like 60% of trade with it, and that share is only going to grow in the future, simply because they are so close. It's the US who is worried to be cut off Taiwan.

Anyway, China dominating chip and AI will likely happen soon. They don't really need Taiwan for that.

Sorry but that take is insane. Don't you think that people in China just want to live just like people in the US? China dominating the Tech industry vs the US makes no difference to a majority of the people in the world.

The US no longer being able to print money (without massive inflation) out of thin air would force it to be more fiscally responsible like many other countries have to be.

You missed the most important items...

1. The U.S. fails to protect Taiwan. 2. All allies lose confidence in the U.S. nuclear umbrella, and they create their own nuke programs. 3. Japan and S. Korea produce nukes nearly overnight. Lots of other countries follow. We now have a much worse nuclear arms race.

China needs only one reason to make the argument for taking control of Taiwan. That's national security. Taiwan is extremely important as a strategic island for defense of the mainland. For example, go look at a map of Taiwan airspace vs Chinese airspace. Honestly, I find it almost ridiculous that such a great power is boxed in so much by a tiny neighbor.

Personally, I think Taiwan needs to take one for the team and commit to reunification with China. That would cool things down significantly. Maybe the Chinese could even throw in some deals on borders to give the Philippines and other neighbors a break.

If China takes over Taiwan they gain nothing technology wise. All the manufacturing would be destroyed and many engineers would flee or get killed.

China will probably catch up in chip manufacturing and microchip design even without invading Taiwan though.

There's just too many of them, and there'll always be diminishing returns, so at some point what they do will be alright even if it is slightly behind.

The forceful intervention of the US in foreign countries whenever they tried to be even slightly leftist is well documented.

This is nonsense, there are plenty of very leftist countries that USA didn't attack, so that provably wasn't the reason.

Communism is first and foremost anti democratic and authoritarian in these countries, that is the main issue. If you take Sweden that was very close to going towards worker owned economy in the 80's USA didn't do anything to them, same with rest of Europe. Sweden since then became much more right wing and moved away from those ideas, but at the time it looked very likely.

Almost all of the American military actions you mentioned were in response to Soviet or communist actions. In no way were they just the American government being violent for the sake of it.

Maybe you think that America and allies should have just stepped aside and let communist armies capture the various states, but geopolitics in real life is a little more complex than that.

It is not clear that the wars you cited, especially Vietnam, were necessary to fight and defeat communism, anymore than the Iraq was needed to reduce WMDs. This might be the reason for the wars given by the government, even a sincerely held position, but that is not to say that it is correct. Having a better economic system relative to communism, diplomacy with China to part ways from USSR - these seem more important.

That great violence unleashed in various wars wasn't actually necessary for realizing the goals of the countries involved is a very important history lesson which can prevent future violence.

(Similarly, one of the motivations for World Wars - who gets control of the colonies, seems futile in hindsight as the system of colonies was anyway dismantled.)

It is kind of funny how delusional western people are on these subjects. This is similar to reading books on economic success by western people, they go through 50 hoops to explain why africa is doing bad but don’t mention the slaughter, exploitation etc. Those countries suffered and how it made first world countries even richer. It just seems like the stronger crush the weak and write the history always, the most obvious and undeniable example is israel situation

Manufacturing Consent defines anti-communism as the US's national religion and a pillar of political power...

To nitpick a single point:

A future where Chinese companies own the EV market in the US with all of the American user data going back to servers in China- that's just not a future the US govt. wants

I agree, but why do cars need to send data to servers again? I don't grok why Tesla does it and I don't grok why BYD does it either. What's wrong with the alternative where we allow real competition that benefits everyone, and then ban any features (eg sending data to servers) that the government gets nervous about? I don't see how this is any different from the myriad of other requirements on cars (eg mandated safety belts etc etc etc).

I recognize that state-subsidised competition still isn't fair, so I support import tariffs that match those subsidies, but any further and you're just hurting competition and the consumer, right?

Thing is, super cheap EVs and solar panels is exactly what we should want. There's a climate crisis going on and these things are a big part of the solution. With climate goggles on, to put import tariffs on the tech that's gonna save the world sound batshit insane. We should want those tariffs to be as low as possible.

Honestly, it's wild that the US hasn't invested heavily into green energy for the past couple of decades. They could've been in an extremely strong position of selling the tech which all countries need to transition their energy sectors. But instead they've ... fought it? And let China and other countries outside of their hegemony eat their lunch? Why?

That is largely due to Chinese chemical manufacturers who are selling the chemicals to Mexico and then those drugs are smuggled into the US.

i say china is not at all responsible for the drug, except as a contract manufacturer. If china doesn't do it, somebody else would've. China just does it cheaply.

The drug problems come from the cartels, and from the fact that US's war on drugs makes drugs expensive, and thus profitable. There's no possibility of humans relinquishing drug use - think about the prohibition and the problems that it caused.

I say, just allow drugs to be manufactured, and sold (under license and regulation) in the US. It's gonna be like alcohol. This will take away the profits from the cartels, and they will stop buying from china. It will increase tax revenue, as drug consumption can be taxed (like tobacco today is).

It will also remove the stigma, and reduce drug enforcement costs in police. The only thing society has to give up is the moral high horse of drug use.

They only respond to force

In the wise words of Chairman Mao:

"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."

What if we lived in a world where Chinese are allowed to sell their cheap EVs but the government was actually on the side of the common man instead of corporate elites, and actually scrutinized anti-consumer totalitarian data collection, because its wrong, and anti-humanity on principle, and not because it's not controlled by them.

"doubling down on liberal democracy" got us to where we are now wrt China.

Banning all the paths to growth got the US to where it is now. Everything China did to out-compete the US was illegal in the US - the working conditions wouldn't have passed muster, the environmental damage wouldn't have been acceptable, the investment in cheap energy was off the agenda and the focus on heavy industry was broadly against the policy position which focused on financialisation and growing service industries.

We can argue until the cows come home which policies were the important ones (it is clear that some of what China does is counterproductive) but a key factor was legislative restrictions in the West. That is the opposite of the liberal part of liberal democracy. A key part of liberalism is giving people freedom to better their own lives.

We need the EV and solar transition to happen, and if the Chinese government wants to subsidize that we should let them.

all of the American user data going back to servers in China

There's a long running argument with the EU over all EU user's data going back to the US where there are no privacy laws or protection against surveillance (US constitution only protects US nationals!), so the US government would have more credibility on this if it recognized that.

I can’t help but think this IP theft scare, while completely real, has a version in the Western US-led economics called ”big business” or ”VC money” or ”platform control”.

How many independent innovations get snatched (sherlocked?) by big business taking the idea and making their own version, when they see a small player that found a customer segment a large company never bothered investigating?

When large sums of money is what’s needed to execute any novel idea to full completion before your competitors can, that money becomes just a version of ”IP theft” or unfair competition. I think what they are getting is a taste of their own medicine.

EVs were a mature idea a decade+ ago, but big money oil companies hamstrung it and big money ICE manufacturers argued it was not worth their time or effort. The Chinese market and leaders knew the fundamentals were valid and cornered the entire manufacturing market before it could be cornered by western companies.

The narrative of 'data-privacy' being a threat is IMO a whole lot of simplist bait. The real thing at stake here is the vehicle manufacturing jobs that are being threatened, and the whole chain of high value jobs that come with it. People who lose their jobs lose faith in their governments. And countries losing a high value chain of goods/services isn't going to do well psychologically for them.

This [video](https://youtu.be/BQ23sgi_mgw?si=3HOm3WeWKO7VJMzr) called <Is China’s High-Tech ‘Overproduction’ Killing Jobs In The West?> from Channel NewsAsia covers it. Highly recommend you westerners to watch it; there's some really heavy handed defense/reasoning from the chinese side.

That's just implicitly admitting defeat. We can't compete so will make it about guns.

>with all of the American user data going back to servers in China

How about a future where user data goes to no servers of no country at all? Am I asking too much?

Honestly, I'm less and less inclined to believe in these numbers.

If your average Chinese person lives in a comfortable, well-built apartment that costs 1/4th of what it would cost in the US, drives a car that's similarly built but cost $10k instead of $40k, and eats food thats the quarter of the price, could you convincingly state that he has the quarter of the actual wealth, even though the numbers would indicate that.

per capita GDP (the living standards of Chinese people)

note that the parenthetical isn't entirely true. it's a very mathematical measure of living standards, and sure, one number is much bigger than the other, which does mean something, but how happy are you really doomscrolling various feeds about how the world is doomed? The wrong person's gonna get elected, you just know it. How happy can you really be knowing that to be the future? Or, hey, know anybody who's died from fentanyl recently?

There's a lot GDP doesn't capture. Hell, in terms of buying more things and driving the economy, you could look at it and say divorce is good for GDP since everybody is now buying twice as much stuff, not to mention all the lawyers bills. Not sure I'd argue that it's great for living standards though. so yes, let's compare GDP for what it measures, money number divided by people number, and see that our number is bigger, yay. But simplifying that to living standards is lazy shortcut thinking. If a FAANG engineer makes $400k/yr, but minimum wage is $15/hr or $30,000, their average pay is $215k, which sounds pretty great! The living standards for two someones making $215k are much nicer than for the one person making $30k.

How much do you trust your neighbors? How about those city/rural/suburb folk, especially the ones the extremists on the opposite side of the political spectrum? That contribute to a good living standard?

GDP isn't a good measure of living standards, it's a neat number to compare, and means something, but it doesn't define living standards.

I disagree. People don't want to live under authoritarian regimes. I'm willing to bet that for many working professionals have moved to the West to escape authoritarianism at home, and were willing to accept lower living standards (smaller home etc.) in exchange for greater freedom and peace of mind.

How is it clear that authoritarian state capitalism has won the fight? China is still less productive per Capita than the west. Most of it's advantage comes from it's population size, and demographics are bringing that to a halt.

I’m trying to understand where this perspective is coming from?

From most measures China has peaked. Its state capitalism has gotten it a housing bubble and investment in industries with not enough customers. Combine that with its falling birth rate and high youth unemployment it would seem that the failures, not successes, are on display.

Everybody is realizing that the marriage between liberal democracy and bourgeois capitalism is coming to an end.

I’m not. What do you recommend me to read, in order to come to that realization?

Pax Americana is a farce. There was always war going on and America was always involved, and for their own imperial interests.

This narrative that the US are the good guys and they are the police of the world is the propaganda of the empire. It's coolaid.

I don't think the Chinese or whatever other empire comes will be better.

But this Pax Americana is just lies. Go tell Vietnam, Chile, East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq, and so on about it.

And the thing is, China doesn't care about this. If every country on the planet being nuked up was the price to pay for domination, then so be it.

Citation needed.

It’s easy to see why as well.

Take Zuckerberg for example. He went in front of congress and spouted as much anti-china rhetoric as he can. He obviously does not want competition from Chinese social media companies such as TikTok. He wants TikTok banned. Meta even admitted that it hired a PR agency to try to connect TikTok to CCP.

Take Elon for example. He definitely wants Trump in office because he knows if Chinese EVs ever make it to American shores, Tesla would have fierce competition. Trump wanting massive tariffs on Chinese goods matters little to Elon. Elon doesn’t care if he has to pay $5 for a Chinese good at Walmart instead of $2.50. Only commoners will suffer. But as long as Elon gets extremely high tariffs on Chinese EVs, he’ll be happy.

For Schmidt, it’s clear that he has big ownership stakes in American tech companies. Chinese tech companies are a real threat to them in competition.

The Chinese state won't, but if freedom is really so much better, the people will find ways to escape non-freedom - just like they already do from every country that's obviously worse than the USA and the USA seems powerless to stop - and the Chinese state will have no choice except to become free or suffer brain drain and collapse.

There's some truth in that, but it's a much more apt description of post-Soviet Russia. They celebrate their WW2 win like a bona fide religious event every year.

Other than that, I'm genuinely curious about the origin of the "inevitable war that we have to win for humanity" sentiment.

There is a line of evidence/thinking that says relations between democracies are a lot more stable. So if you make everyone a democracy there would be no wars and a lot more peace. And peace is what humanity (or each individual) aspires to be.

Unfortunately this may result in some degree of intervention or politicking that others may not like. Intervention, specifically, is forcing judgement onto others.

Regarding these elites, you could say it's a calling from whatever Christian god that tells them to spread whatever good they deem it to be. But it may just as well be hubris, or human nature - a superiority complex that comes from being at the top of the chain of 'merit' and status. Anyway, it's happened before. Even in the colonial times there were British who thought colonizing India was a 100% good thing for humanity.

Freedom is better because it removes hurdles to more rapid evolutions of efficiency, which leads to better utilization of energy, bringing better material life for every human.

Anything taken to extremes is bad. The chinese that studied in America and decided to go back made such a decision when they saw things like school shootings and riots.

In order for the LLM or agent to do what you want, you'd need to be able to precisely specify what you want

no, you just need to vaguely know what you want, and get the LLM to produce something that you then examine, and crawl towards the end goal.

LLM's could potentially allow fast iteration from a laymen's description of what they want.

Thats still gonna be a big change shift if such companies could axe every 2nd or 3rd developer in their teams. In that situation you might be competing with your colleague not to loose job or have to be "non-arogant" (/s) to ask for pay rise.

There's definitely room to build specification builder agents, that have access to documentation and previous specifications.

The other day I was looking into adding Trusted Types in the Content-Security-Policy header, which was something new to me. In my chat with Claude I asked:

"Lets brainstorm 10 a list of ideas closely related to this so we can think of anything we might be missing on the topic to consider."

And that provided a good list of items to review to consider and expand out the sphere of thinking for the LLM.

It is an infuriatingly hard problem to have the LLM produce excellent results every single time, and have it just do everything and want it to read our mind and all the knowledge and context of a task. I think we'll make some good progress over the next few years as agentic workflows are built out to mimic out thought processes, and the cost/capability of the LLMs keeps improving.

Even if you formally specify what you want on a high level and the LLM implements it on a low level, yes, you can call yourself the programmer and the LLM would be a compiler but it would still be amazingly useful

It's funny how this guy, as most rich business types, thinks he actually knows everything, and he's an expert in all domains. What the hell does he know about war? He's not a general or admiral or something. Of course he imagines being CEO of a large company is the same thing, but it's really not.

Something to keep in mind when reading his other pronouncements.

> And one of the things to know about war is that the offense always has the advantage because you can always overwhelm the defensive systems.

This is not actually one of the things to know about war. It's about as far from the truth as you can get.

... Unless you are writing the rules of war:

"Secretary of Defense Ash Carter appointed Schmidt as chairman of the DoD Innovation Advisory Board announced March 2, 2016. It will be modeled like the Defense Business Board and will facilitate the Pentagon at becoming more innovative and adaptive.

In August 2020, Schmidt launched the podcast Reimagine with Eric Schmidt.[71][72] In December 2021, Schmidt joined Chainlink Labs as a strategic advisor.[73] In October 2022, he co-authored a piece titled "America Could Lose the Tech Contest With China" for Foreign Affairs with Ylli Bajraktari, former executive director of the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.[74] In March 2023, Schmidt testified at a U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability hearing regarding AI.

In 2022, Schmidt was appointed to the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology, a legislative commission charged with making policy recommendations to Congress and the Executive Branch.[1]"

"Since 2023, Schmidt has been involved in building White Stork, a startup developing suicide attack drones.[2]"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahemerson/2024/01/23/eric-sc...

If only there was some kind of ongoing event that demonstrated exactly this…

Indeed: how to avoid needless conflicts is the key. Having a strong offensive is temporary, and potentially difficult to maintain in the long run.

The use of AI/robots in war is probably not a good way to ingrain into people how to avoid conflicts either: as sad as it sound, let them get a taste of it first hand, and that'll probably calm things down more efficiently: not for a few hours/days, but decades.

Not necessarily. The Trojan Horse wasn’t so disastrous because it was filled with way more soldiers. It was because they had penetrated all of the defenses and had the element of surprise.

Iran just sent I-don’t-know-how-many drones and missiles at Israel like a few months ago. A few of them landed, but most were caught and intercepted in the air. Here’s the thing: if even one of them had hit, say, the center of Tel Aviv, or the old city in Jerusalem, it would have been a massively successful attack, even if none of the other ones had done any damage. The size of zero armies was measured in that exchange.

It might be a reference to the blue-team red-team asymmetry, and how in cybersecurity the attacker has an advantage. The attacker there only needs one success and can rapidly try different avenues, while the blue team just needs to miss patching one system and that's it. And while patching may be technically simple, the organizational efforts around it are sometimes... eh.

In war, defenders can entrench more and more and a lot of work and planning is put into hitting either before the defenses are up, or not at all.

I guess the meaning is that defending already starts losing. It is much better to be in the offensive, it takes your enemy much more effort to go from defense to offense

The premise is that the offense knows the battle plan beforehand and the defense doesn't I believe, one of those "be aggressive" executive metaphors I think he internalized but not the reality of ground warfare, since probably the US Civil War when trench warfare took over at the latest.

But when those “casualties” are drones perhaps it turns out to be true?

There's nothing wrong with getting involved in foreign wars, if that means supporting a nation that has been attacked by its neighbor in gross violation of international law.

I don't agree with US involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan and many other places, but Ukraine is a obviously totally different from those. Marjorie Taylor Greene may not give a damn as she lives thousands of kilometers from Russia (or maybe she's just been bought by Russian money), but morally she's wrong. When it comes to Russian imperialism, the only right thing to do is help its victims fight back.

I don't think calling him "Kissinger's buddy" works as a smear since Kissinger was very friendly with China.

I'm not trying to defend Schmidt, but you're naive if you think the US shouldn't develop AI weapons.

How would the world look like now if the US took the high road and refused to develop nuclear weapons and instead let Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia develop them instead?

if there was going to be a gold rush, the surefire way to make money is to sell shovels.

Even modern cartoon villains are better people than that. Sure, they want to take over the world, but they do so overtly (and wouldn’t try to suppress an interview where they said so) and have a modicum of concern for their own family and underlings.

Eric Schmidt killed what Google could become by making it the monster it is today. Essentially, he made it into Microsoft when it was on a trajectory to become a glorious Sun.

Very interesting, I didn't know anything more than he was more of a suit. Good to be aware he has technical pedigree.

Throughout the whole talk he's using an alternatively flippant/hyperbolic speaking style that probably has been effective for him in the past when addressing high-level non-technical policymakers. He speaks to their policy/strategic insecurities about technological change and conveys a sense of inflated urgency.

It probably wasn't the right tone for this audience though. But it's a style of rhetoric that's probably intentional.

he clearly has no idea of what he is saying or has total idea and purposedly lying to his own benefit (my take)

Anyone have the video? I'd rather watch.

There's exactly one country (Japan) where establishing a liberal democracy at gunpoint worked out. The US then tried to do the same in like a quarter of the world and kept failing. At some point some people up there ought to get the message right? I don't know how else to do it but war simply isn't it.

So destabilizing and destroying a country for the sake of establishing liberal values is a morally righteous decision?

If it hears what you hear, hears what you say, reads what you write, sees what you see, notes what you do, it will end up knowing more about you than you yourself. The way you can interact with it will be the same way others can interact with it.

Also, sensors like HRMs or activity monitors could give it insights into your emotional state.

It could replicate your reactions.

Encoding the human experience will probably get much better over time. They're already experimenting with audio and video interfaces. I saw some other products that combine fitbit like sensors with an LLM.

I don't know what the results of combining all that data with an LLM will look like, but I think recording our experience to be used by an AI will only get better.

Sounds more like: "Sorry it became public"