Eric Schmidt, who was top boss at Google for a decade in the early 2000s, said during a conference interview published by the All-In podcast Wednesday that he doesn’t believe in remote work in part because it’s not helping U.S. tech companies compete with China’s cutthroat work culture.
“If you’re going to be in tech and you’re going to win, you’re going to have to make some tradeoffs,” Schmidt said. “Remember, we’re up against the Chinese; the Chinese work-life balance consists of 996, which is 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week
Whoa! What happened to the promise of AI? It was supposed to relieve us of the burden of work, not add more. CNBC reported:
Eric Schmidt’s family office, called Hillspire, has made investments in 22 private AI firms since 2019
Schmidt has a family office. Hillspire LLC is essentially his personal private equity underwriter (PEU).
But there's more. He co-founded Innovation Endeavors, a venture capital firm. Eric and Wendy Schmidt have multiple layers of foundations.
This upstanding TechGod encouraged Stanford students to steal from others, develop their project and when it appears to have a profitable future, hire lawyers to negotiate a settlement.
Intellectual property theft is foundational to AI, according to Schmidt Why would a storied executive and TechGod make such a suggestion to students? Because he is a member of the group that does not have to follow the rules. As a matter of fact, Schmidt has been making them for quite some time, alongside other noted TechGods.
Don't expect elected officials to do anything about it. Politicians Red and Blue love PEU and their new TechGod brethren. Increasingly, more are one.
Update 5-26-26: An X post noted:
Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.
Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence." Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."
Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter. They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.
One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."
Update 9-4-26: Sony Music and Warner Music are suing Anthropic for the theft of their copyrighted music.
The lawsuit covers 10,000 musical works, including popular songs like Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger," Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You," and Taylor Swift's "Paper Rings." The complaint further states that Mann downloaded over 5 million pirated books from Library Genesis in June 2021, and that Anthropic employees downloaded at least 2 million more in July 2022. Those books contained lyrics and sheet music used in Anthropic's model training.
Sony and Warner are claiming up to $150,000 for each instance of willful copyright infringement and up to $25,000 for each instance in which copyright information was removed from a work.
Lawyers hired to clean everything up. Check, check....
