Eric Schmidt - Deleted AI talk at Stanford

We originally posted a transcript of an August 2024 talk by Eric Schmidt at Stanford University, when the original video was removed from YouTube. The main reason for the removal was probably because Eric Schmidt made some comments about the work ethic at Google as the reason why they have fallen behind in the AI race. Comments that he later retracted. Since then, the video has again become widely available, so instead of a full transcript, here are some key points from the talk:

For our purposes, what's really interesting about this talk is his comment that the smaller Large Language Model developers are falling behind in the race. In large part, because they are under-capitalized. LLMs will eventually cost many tens of billions to train. This is relevant for Canadian AI startups, Cohere, one of the smaller LLM players, which we track closely.

Other key takeaways:

-Eric is bullish on NVIDIA.

-Everyone will be able to do their own programming soon.

-Eric says "we" (meaning the American government) need to become friends with Canada. This is because of the enormous electricity needs of AI computing.

Here's the part about Google that proved controversial:

"Google decided that work life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning. And the startups, the reason startups work is because the people work like hell. And I'm sorry to be so blunt, but the fact of the matter is if you all leave the university and go found a company, you're not going to let people work from home and only come in one day a week."

This might be another unguarded moment where Eric suggests a way of patching up copyright infringmenets after the fact:

Eric: 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 But if nobody uses your product, it doesn't matter that you stole all the content.And do not quote me.

Host: Right, you're on camera.

Eric: Yeah, that's right.