Things Eric Schmidt says – The Verge

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

2024-08-14T20:00:25-04:00

Eric Schmidt. | Photo By Lukas Schulze/Sportsfile for Collision via Getty Images

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 …

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Eric Schmidt, who bought YouTube for a premium, thinks social networks are ‘amplifiers for idiots’

2020-10-21T18:01:14-04:00

The Verge used to have a fine tradition of cataloging all of the times when Eric Schmidt stuck his foot in his mouth, and today's feels like a worthy addition: the former Google CEO and executive chairman has decided that social networks are "amplifiers for idiots."

The fuller quote, according to Bloomberg: "The context of social networks serving as amplifiers for idiots and crazy people is not what we intended."

Without knowing who "we" refers to, you might think he's talking about how the entire tech industry has failed to keep sites like Facebook and Twitter from creating echo chambers and polarizing politics around the world (though so …

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Eric Schmidt tells room full of iPhone users: ‘So much for the Android monopoly in Europe’

2016-05-25T05:17:02-04:00

For a man who makes more than his fair share of verbal gaffes, Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt can still come up with the odd zinger when he needs to. Schmidt was speaking to a packed house at Startup Fest in Amsterdam when the audience were asked to raise their hands if they used an iPhone. The majority did, and Schmidt responded: "So much for the Android monopoly in Europe." He went on to admit that he himself used both an iPhone 6S and a Galaxy S7, before making the case for the latter's superiority.

"The Samsung S7 is better: it has a better battery and a better camera," said Schmidt with a smile, telling the laughing audience. …

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Eric Schmidt wants an AI assistant named Not-Eric

2016-01-12T04:52:48-05:00

Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt thinks artificial intelligence has the potential to solve the "hard problems" that the world faces today, including climate change, education, and population growth - and he wants his own "Not-Eric" AI assistant, as well. As reported by Bloomberg, Schmidt made the comments at a conference in New York this week, where he called for more collaboration on the kinds of AI technology that Google and Facebook have begun developing.

"Every single advance has occurred because smart people got in a room and eventually they standardized approaches," Schmidt said. "The promise of this is so profound that we - A …

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Google’s Eric Schmidt wants ‘spell-checkers, but for hate and harassment’

2015-12-07T14:10:09-05:00

Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman and former CEO, says that work needs to be done toward stopping the spread of hate and harassment online. In an opinion piece published in The New York Times this afternoon, Schmidt writes that it's necessary for governments, tech companies, and individuals - basically everyone - to make sure that the internet is used for improving the lives of others worldwide, rather than for oppression or recruitment into terrorist groups.

"We should build tools to help de-escalate tensions on social media."

"We should make it ever easier to see the news from another country's point of view, and understand the glo …

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Google Glass isn’t dead, it’s being ‘made ready for users,’ says Eric Schmidt

2015-03-23T08:44:44-04:00

After Google stopped selling its wearable Glass device in January this year, many people speculated that the controversial gadget was on its way out for good. However, Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt has said that the technology behind Glass is too important to throw away, and that the program has been put under the control of Nest's Tony Fadell to "make it ready for users" in the future.

Glass is a "big and very fundamental platform for Google."

"We ended the Explorer program and the press conflated this into us canceling the whole project, which isn't true," Schmidt told The Wall Street Journal. "Google is about taking risks and t …

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Google executive Eric Schmidt, man, makes total ass of himself at SXSW

2015-03-16T18:28:38-04:00

Between high-stakes discrimination suits and the dubious behavior of so-called allies, there's a tempest of awful gender relations right now in Silicon Valley. But the loudest storms that make headlines are only a small part of tech's sexism problem. It's not just bad weather, it's bad climate - lots of small patterns that add up to a persistent mess. And as Eric Schmidt demonstrated today at SXSW, even top executives are capable of fueling the storm.

In a panel today, The Wall Street Journal reports, Schmidt had lots of thoughts about gender diversity in the technology industry - and often interrupted co-panelist Megan Smith, the US's chie …

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Google pulls funding from conservative group for ‘lying’ about climate change

2014-09-22T21:52:03-04:00

Google is to stop funding a major conservative group over its stance on climate change. Speaking in a radio interview with NPR's Diane Rehm, Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt said that Google would not be renewing its membership to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), because the group was "literally lying" by opposing efforts to reduce global warming. The right-leaning ALEC, which has received donations from fossil fuel companies such as Exxon Mobil, has fought against the US government's efforts to pursue renewable energy sources, battled against regulations for coal power plants, tried to get ecological activists class …

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Google’s Eric Schmidt: ‘let us celebrate capitalism’

2014-03-07T15:10:37-05:00

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Speaking today at a panel at the SXSW conference, Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt emphasized that Google is "very, very worried" about the class tensions that underlie recent protests in the Bay Area, where high-salaried tech employees have drastically driven up rents.

Gentrification has been going on for 40 years, but it's accelerated recently and we clearly need to do something to "ameliorate" the issue, he told Wired's Steven Levy.

In Schmidt's view, the tensions in the Bay Area are a manifestation of a global trend in which technology is displacing human labor without proportionately raising standards of living for most of the …

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Eric Schmidt says encryption will help Google crack Chinese censorship and stop the NSA

2014-01-24T02:08:46-05:00

eric schmidt north korea

Eric Schmidt thinks encryption is the answer to many of the internet's problems. Google's executive chairman said last November that "encrypting everything" could "end government censorship in a decade." Now Schmidt says that in that same decade, encryption could "open up countries with strict censorship laws," giving their people "a voice."

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Schmidt said that Google was attempting to strengthen its encryption so the world's governments "won't be able to penetrate it" and obtain private data. Those efforts, Schmidt said, would create particular problems for "governments like China's," which he t …

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