Eric Schmidt, who led Google from 2001 to 2011, has some words to say about the company’s current labor policies. One of them is that, in his opinion, workers should come to the office more often.
The billionaire explained his position in a class at Stanford University, recorded and published by the School of Engineering. In the question round, Professor Erik Brynjolfsson addressed Schmidt and pointed out that, despite Google’s advantage, it had fallen behind in the development of artificial intelligence. In fact, the situation triggered an internal red alert declared by Sunder Pichai, the current CEO of the company.
Although many may not know it, the existence of ChatGPT would have been much more unlikely without Google. In 2017, a group of researchers proposed a new architecture called ‘transformers.’ This discovery laid the groundwork for applications like ChatGPT and other similar AI models.
Brynjolfsson continued and clarified that, in a way, ‘they had lost the initiative in favor of OpenAI.’ Schmidt’s response was peculiar: ‘Google decided that work-life balance, leaving early and working from home was more important than winning.’ In startups, like OpenAI was at the time, ‘people work like demons.’
Schmidt addressed the students and explained to them that ‘if they drop out of college and start a company, they will not allow people to work from home and only come in one day a week, at least if they want to compete against other startups.’ It may be an error or an exaggeration on Schmidt’s part, but the truth is that in 2022, Google required its workers to come to the office three days a week, according to SFGATE.
