Roundup: Eric Schmidt says the quiet part out loud

“Move fast and break things” has been the unofficial motto of Silicon Valley for quite a long time. At certain moments, the industry has tried to convince us that’s not how they operate and that they do actually care about their broader impacts, not just capturing market share and making ridiculous sums of money. But in a candid moment, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt admitted that’s not really the case.

In a conversation at Stanford with Erik Brynjolfsson (one of the guys who pushed the automation scare of the mid-2010s that proved way overblown), Schmidt said he hoped all the attendees would become entrepreneurs and gave an example of how generative AI would be able to help them (one that, once again, vastly overstates what these tools can do). He told the students that if TikTok gets banned, they should tell a large language model to make a TikTok clone and steal all the user-generated content and music on TikTok to populate their new platform — something he said would take no more than a minute — then launch it for the world to use.

Surely, someone would notice the platform was built on stolen content, but Schmidt has the solution: “if it took off, then you’d hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up,” because “if nobody uses your product, it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content.” When reminded by Brynjolfsson he was on camera, Schmidt reiterated that “Silicon Valley will run these tests and clean up the mess. And that’s typically how those things are done.”

If nothing else, the casual way Schmidt can discuss breaking the rules on such an enormous scale shows just how much Silicon Valley needs to be held to account. Tech billionaires are lashing out in part because of the scrutiny and minimal regulatory pressure that was finally applied to them and their companies in the past few years, but if we’re to seriously rein the industry in and curtail its harms and abuses, those actions need to go much further.

The generative AI moment shows us that very clearly, with companies large and small freely stealing whatever they can get their hands on to train their models, knowing they could delay enforcement or regulation by hiring expensive lawyers and lobbyists, and even sending Sam Altman to charm political leaders so they’d water down their ambitions. Then, once their valuations had soared, they could start buying off struggling news publishers to leave them alone. Silicon Valley needs to be humbled and shown it must follow the same rules as everyone else.

In this week’s roundup, find recommended reads on how major tech companies are trying to rewrite emissions reporting rules to hide their soaring greenhouse gases, and growing concerns Elon Musk is going to have to sell more Tesla shares to finance Twitter/X. Plus, a bunch of labor updates and other tech news you might have missed this week!

On Tech Won’t Save Us, I spoke to Hussein Kesvani about how culpable social media is for the far-right riots that recently occurred in the UK. I was also interviewed by Deutschlandfunk Kultur about the Google monopoly ruling and CBC Front Burner about the AI bubble.

Have a great week!

— Paris