'Lazy' staff going home early has caused Google to 'suffer', says ex-boss

The former chief executive at Google said the company lost ground to rivals by letting staff leave the office early and work from home.

Eric Schmidt told students at Stanford University that the company was struggling against new rivals such as OpenAI because of its work culture.

It comes after the tech giant was caught off guard by the vast success of the ChatGPT bot launched by OpenAi in late 2022.

The success of Chat GPT launched an AI arms race between the two companies to release new products.

In a now-deleted video from April, Schmidt, who led Google until 2011 and was its chairman until 2015, told students: "Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.

"And the reason the start-ups work is because the people work like hell...The fact of the matter is, if you all leave the university and go found a company, you’re not going to let people work from home and only come in one day a week if you want to compete against the other start-ups.

Schmidt, 69, later rowed back on his comments, telling the Wall Street Journal he "misspoke." He also encouraged students to play fast and loose with copyright rules when launching a start-up.

He told the students: "If TikTok is banned, here’s what I propose each and every one of you do: Say to your [AI] the following: Make me a copy of TikTok, steal all the users, steal all the music, put my preferences in it, produce this program in the next 30 seconds."

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Google has said it would expand its AI-generated summaries for search queries to six new countries, just two months after it rolled back some capabilities following a problem-riddled launch.

The feature was widely panned after screenshots of factually inaccurate answers circulated across the internet, such as a pizza recipe that listed glue as an ingredient and an answer wrongly stating that former US President Barack Obama is Muslim.

Google acknowledged the "odd and erroneous overviews" and announced updates to the product in a blog post in late May. These updates added restrictions to which queries would display AI answers and curbed user-generated content from websites like Reddit from serving as source material for answers.

Senior product director Hema Budaraju said: "I have enough evidence to say that quality is only improving."

Earlier this week, a US judge said he was planning to issue an order forcing Google's parent company Alphabet to give Android users more ways to download apps, but would not micromanage the tech giant's business.

It follows a jury verdict last year for the maker of the popular video game Fortnite, Epic Games.

Last week, US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled for the US Justice Department and said Google had illegally monopolized web search, spending billions to become the internet’s default search engine.

Google has denied the claims.