Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt says tech giant is losing to OpenAI as it supports WFH, 'work-life balance'

Former CEO and chairman of Google Eric Schmidt said employees at the tech giant work only one day a week from the office. (Image credit: Reuters)

Former Google CEO and billionaire investor Eric Schmidt has said that the reason the tech giant was falling behind OpenAI and other startups in the AI (artificial intelligence) race is because it supports remote work and work-life balance.

Schmidt was attending an interview at Stanford University and was being questioned by professor Erik Brynjolfsson and the students. They brought up Google’s breakthrough artificial intelligence discovery from 2017 and pointed out that despite that early lead, it has fallen behind in AI development.

“They’ve kind of lost the initiative to OpenAI, and even the last leaderboard I saw, Anthropic’s Claude was at the top of the list,” Brynjolfsson said. “I asked [Google CEO] Sundar [Pichai] this, he didn’t really give me a very sharp answer. Maybe you have a sharper or a more objective explanation for what’s going on there.”

Responding to this, Schmidt first reinforced that he’s no longer an employee of the company and then said, "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 the people work like hell.”

“I’m sorry to be so blunt,” he added. “But the fact of the matter is, if you all leave the university and go found a company, you’re not gonna let people work from home and only come in one day a week if you want to compete against the other startups.”

In a Stanford talk posted today, Eric Schmidt says the reason why Google is losing to @OpenAI and other startups is because Google only has people coming in 1 day per week pic.twitter.com/XPxr3kdNaC

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— Alex Kehr (@alexkehr) August 13, 2024

The former Google executive then said there’s a history of dominant tech companies missing out on the next wave of the industry, and supported the importance of “crazy ideas” and founders like Elon Musk who insist on their employees working from the office.

Google, however, has made it clear that it wants its employees to return to the office. As per a CNBC report, Google now requires most employees to physically come to the company’s offices at least three days a week. It has also been tracking attendance via office badges and office attendance as part of its employee reviews.