Ex-Google CEO Says Successful AI Startups Can Steal IP and Hire Lawyers To 'Clean Up the Mess' 42
Eric Schmidt, at a recent talk where he also talked -- and then walked back the comment -- on Google's work-culture: 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.
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And do not quote me.
That's the command. Boom, boom, boom, boom.
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And do not quote me.
Monopolist IP is Imaginary (Score:2, Insightful)
Google is upset about competitors.
Oh dear!
anyway
Re: (Score:3)
CB radio all over again only worse (Score:5, Interesting)
Once upon a time, CB radio was a thing. If you had one, you could communicate with others kind of like FRS but with better range. It made mobile live chat communities that were primarily used by commercial truck drivers. Then it got popular and quickly became useless for all the idiots on the air.
The Internet was quite a different place before AOL and Eternal September. First it flooded with idiots, then the commercial interests came in to market to them and exploit them.
AI, once it gets a bit better at assembling programs with nothing but a simple prompt, is going to produce so much that finding anything you actually want isn't going to be a needle in a haystack proposition, it's going to be like looking for a specific atom in the ocean.
Re:CB radio all over again only worse (Score:4, Interesting)
> Then it got popular and quickly became useless for all the idiots on the air.
Nope, what killed it was the FCC's lousy choice of 11 meters, an HF band with excellent global propagation at sunspot maxima, for a service which, by Part 95 regulation, was only allowed to span a 150-mile distance.
In 1975~76, when CB got popular, the sunspot activity was low and thus so was propagation, so background noise was low enough that you could talk with a station some miles away. People put up base stations, 'home-channel' communities formed and tended to be self-regulating. Because of the 5-watt legal power limit, even with just 23 to start with there were enough channels to go around, enough for the idiots to go play in their own channels.
Then sunspot activity rose and the 'skip' came in, something entirely predictable from 11 meters' days as a ham band, and legal communications got drowned in the hash 'n' trash which was the global mixture of signals. Unless you ran illegal levels of power you weren't going to be heard. That's what killed it.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep. And now we have GMRS to replace it, and you have to get a license to serve as an attestation that you will not abuse it. Too bad they wrote the regs like crap. For example can you or can't you have a GMRS radio with a detachable antenna? The way the regs are written, it's questionable; the prohibition on removable antennas is in the section on radios with digital features, but it doesn't explicitly say it only applies to them. It seems pretty obvious that allowing 50W means you're going to have radios
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
AI, once it gets a bit better at assembling programs with nothing but a simple prompt, is going to produce so much that finding anything you actually want isn't going to be a needle in a haystack proposition, it's going to be like looking for a specific atom in the ocean.
I foresee real programmers commanding salaries that are multiples (if not exponential) of current ones because they actually know how computers work, instead of the flood of chat-kiddies that'll come along and call themselves coders because they can write out a prompt whose output will compile, but they'll be unable to explain how it actually works.
Re: (Score:2)
AI isn't going to survive the first big round of IP lawsuits. Literally none of the transformers out now have training data that is capable of passing any lawsuit.
UHF CB works fine here (Score:2)
80-channel 477 MHz UHF CB [wikipedia.org] is very popular in Australia. Inermodal terminals, waste management facilities, construction sites, etc. will have signs at the entrances telling you which channel the site uses. The US GMRS [wikipedia.org] seems to be an attempt at developing an equivalent, but it doesn't seem to be anywhere near as successful. Having half the channels and requiring a license probably doesn't help.
Worth repeating... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll say it again: [slashdot.org]
This is the guy that was "parental supervision" while Google was "growing up".
Given how Google turned out and acts these days, he was clearing a shitty "parent".
*clearly (Score:2)
D'oh!
Re: (Score:2)
Your signature shows that you are so incapable of understanding satire/irony, that you thought he was serious about threatening to sue you.
Re: (Score:2)
More the fact the troll has poor reading comprehension in the first place.
Re: (Score:2)
The best thing you can say about the TLA's is that they see themselves as Freud's Tyrannical Mother.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Recently with Munchausen By Proxy.
Re:Worth repeating... (Score:4, Interesting)
In the early 2000s, when he turned Google from a great tech company into a spy company, he told the public to suck it up about the privacy stealing crap that he was commanding onto the world. As long as it didn't apply to himself, of course.
https://money.cnn.com/2005/08/... [cnn.com]
Frankly, I'm not surprised at all that he would be caught advocating criminal behaviour (if he says wink wink that makes it alright).
Re: (Score:2)
Lol yeah, Mr. "Don't Be Evil" advocates to "steal all the things", but to also "don't quote me" because he knows he's an asshole.
"Be Evil" (Score:4)
What you get when "Don't" fell off the Google motto.... (And of course, "Just Do It!" was already taken by Nike.)
Yup. Makes perfect sense to me. (Score:3)
Typical sociopath CEO type (Score:3, Interesting)
Also he was disparaging work from home with no grounding in fact or reality.
Re: (Score:1)
His comfort zone is the Council on Foreign Regime Change.
(to quote Congresswoman Gabbard who is now on the Domestic Terrorist list).
The LLM Wish Granting Genie (Score:2)
Apparently Eric Schmidt is as dumber as that relative we avoid on Christmas.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, if you had infinite time and money you could make infinite facebook/youtube clones and eventually one would catch on fire. It took quite a while and quite a number of twitter clones before threads came along and cleaned up.
And does Eric not realize that massive companies with huge userbases have already made a ton of tiktok clones? If tiktok actually does go down (I'll bet it won't but who knows) I suspect instagram/youtube/ and especially snapchat will harvest up its audience, because they've been pr
Re: (Score:2)
With just a few tweaks maybe Slashdot could be the next TikTok if Meta and the rest can't! Just add video and get an algorithm that really bangs and we're set.
Let's Gooooooooooooooooooooo
Boom! Quoted! (Score:3)
“Do not quote me” is just asking for the Streisand effect. If he didn’t want to be quoted he would’ve omitted that or just said nothing at all.
Re: (Score:2)
They certainly *do* (Score:1)
Google robbed Skyhook Wireless of patented technology, and used their monopoly power to block Skyhook from selling services. The Boston judge had the delight of forcing Google to reveal internal email, including the email that said "Stop talking about this, only talk about it in person!"
https://www.bostonglobe.com/bu... [bostonglobe.com]
He knows from experience (Score:3)
This was YouTube's growth model, and it worked.
Eric Schmidt was CEO of Google when they bought YouTube, thereby providing the "whole bunch of lawyers" part of the plan.
CEO of Novell (Score:3)
The same guy that drove the company into the ground and is a Chinese communist daahling...yeah if you don't mind much I think I will just ignore what that trollup has to say.
I had conversations with him as a CEO at Novell and I was thinking....yeah the comany has about 2-3 years left before it goes by by like the Titanic.
With so much going for it, it was hard to imagine a better person to pick than to destroy it.
Re: (Score:2)
Novell was a dominant force in the 90's. Under his leadership Novell failed to innovate. By the time they realized MS wasn't going to accept NDS for NT it was too late. Anyone that used Netware, knew it was a robust file and print solution, but for anything else it was garbage. Schmidt must have been the last person at Novell to grasp they were in trouble and the pivot to linux/java was an absolute joke.
He gets a lot of credit for the success of Google in the early days. I think it more a case of having the
"Don't be evil." (Score:2)
I think I see why they dropped that slogan.
I was wondering if this would hit here (Score:2)
LLMs are not genies (Score:2)
If it were really true that LLMs could "steal all the users," that would be magic of an incredibly profitable kind. If this were true, then AI is for real, and we should all mortgage our homes and buy as much NVDA as possible. Oh, and we should ask for more than three wishes.
Too many times, we ascribe far too much wisdom to those that organizationally led historically successful projects.
Re: (Score:2)
Too many times, we ascribe far too much wisdom to those that organizationally led historically successful projects.
Confirmation bias. It helps that most people have no clue what confirmation bias is.
This guy has worthy teachers (Score:2)
Apple and Microsoft. Apple stole from Xerox, Microsoft stole from DRI and Apple.
Of course, it needs to be mentioned that such "steals" are actually lawful and are driving the technology forward. But you indeed do need lawyers because whoever you stole from will be unhappy and will sue.
Idiot (Score:2)
Google/Youtube got away from being sued into bankruptcy because content was uploaded by users, giving them some shielding. Even Napster only lasted as long as it did because of that.
Lawyers will not save you from just blatantly mass copying of works (many of which will be registered) and putting them on your service yourself.
Right... (Score:2)
Google (via Eric Schmidt): Steal IP, use a wad of lawyers to clean up after
Google Employees: Okay
Google: Not us! Not us!
Re: (Score:2)
Schmidt took the "no" out "Do no evil" and is bragging about it.
What's with Schmidt? (Score:2)