Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said he “slipped up” during a talk at Stanford University when he said remote working was to blame for Google falling behind in the AI ​​race.

In a video posted on YouTube by the Stanford School of Engineering on Tuesday (which has since been removed at Schmidt’s request), Professor Erik Brynjolfsson said Anthropic, not Google, topped the AI ​​leaderboards. Anthropic’s Claude was named the best-performing AI model in a ranking released last month by AI evaluation firm Galileo.

Brynjolfsson then asked Schmidt to explain why Google had “lost the initiative to its competitors” in the field of artificial intelligence.

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Schmidt, CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, responded: “Google decided that work-life balance, early finishes and working from home were more important than winning.”

“Startups work because people work like crazy,” he said. “I’m sorry to be so blunt. But the fact is, if you all leave university and start a company, you’re not going to have people work from home and only come in one day a week if you want to compete with the other startups.”

Since April 2022, months before OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, Google required most employees to report to a physical office at least three days per week. Since then, the company has been tracking office IDs and adding attendance to employee performance reviews.

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An internal Google HR memo last year also revealed that the average permanent Google employee works more than eight hours a day.

After the post went viral, garnering more than 40,000 views in just over a day, Schmidt demanded that the post be removed. In an email on Wednesday, he told the Wall Street Journal that he had “let slip about Google and their working hours.”

“I regret my mistake,” he wrote.

^{Eric Schmidt. Photo credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images}

The Alphabet Workers Union, which represents employees at Google and other Alphabet companies, responded to Schmidt’s comments on Wednesday.

The union said flexible working options were not the cause of the decline in productivity.

“Staff shortages, changing priorities, constant layoffs, stagnant wages and a lack of management perseverance on projects – these factors slow down Google employees every day,” the union wrote in an X-post.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Schmidt has a fortune of $31.4 billion and is the 54th richest person in the world.

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