Last week, Stanford put out a YouTube video of the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt talking to students on everything about AI, which instantly went viral thanks to some bold and controversial comments made by Schmidt. Stanford eventually deleted the video. Controversy apart, there was some genuine insights shared by Schmidt. Weikang Liu has duly captured them in this blog for us.
First about why Nvidia is way ahead of its competition:
“Schmidt explained that the CUDA development platform, developed by NVIDIA, is as important in parallel computing as the C language. Additionally, a large number of people have developed various highly optimized code libraries for CUDA, forming a complete ecosystem, which creates a significant barrier for newcomers…if $300 billion worth of data center business is given to NVIDIA, imagine how much NVIDIA’s stock will rise. Currently, NVIDIA’s B200 architecture CPU is the undisputed leader in computational power. Schmidt also talked to AMD’s Lisa Su about this. AMD is developing their CUDA alternative and working on a program to convert CUDA code into their own format, but it’s not ready yet.”
On how he sees international competition on AI from his perspective of being the chair of the US Government’s AI committee:
“The U.S. currently leads in AI and needs to continue leading, which requires a lot of money. Considering measures like the CHIPS Act, the situation is roughly as follows: The most advanced large models will likely be controlled by a very small number of countries — only those with massive wealth, vast talent, strong education systems, and a desire to win have a chance. Which countries are these? The U.S. is one, China is another, and maybe a few others. But in our lifetime, the competition for knowledge dominance between the U.S. and China will be paramount. The U.S. has effectively banned NVIDIA chips from entering China, so the U.S. has about a 10-year lead in the chip field, especially in extreme ultraviolet technology. For example, today, the U.S. is roughly two years ahead of China in AI, and I guess this gap will widen, which currently enrages China.”
Now on to the controversial bits:
On why his former employer Google fell behind in the AI race despite being ahead on the Transformer architecture (the T in GPT) which underpins today’s Generative AI:
“Schmidt criticized Google’s current company culture, emphasizing that employees prioritize work-life balance over winning competitions, which he finds unacceptable. Startups succeed because they work around the clock.
The reality is that if the students present start a company after graduation, they won’t let their employees work from home every day and finish work early if they want to compete with other startups.
Schmidt shared his observation: In the tech industry, many successful big companies find it difficult to move into other fields after achieving great success in one area. Schmidt believes that the reason is that company founders are unique individuals who must stay on the front lines. Founders can push others to work efficiently.”
Schmidt later admitted he misspoke on his former employer’s work culture.
The most controversial piece however was on how he seemingly encouraged students to plagiarize. In the context of the US Government banning TikTok: “If TikTok is banned, each of you should tell a large language model, “Help me clone TikTok, capture all its users, steal all its music, add my personal preferences, write this program in 30 seconds, and publish it.” Then wait an hour to see if it becomes popular. If not, make minor adjustments and try again…. while I obviously don’t condone illegal music theft, I want to say that if your product becomes popular, you can hire a bunch of lawyers to sort everything out. If no one uses your product, don’t worry — no one will care that you stole someone else’s content. Don’t tell anyone I said this. In short — copy, then use money to settle legal issues — that’s how a lot of innovation in Silicon Valley actually operates.”
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