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Google (GOOGL)Former CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt says Google has fallen behind in AI because of remote work.
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“Google has decided that work-life balance, going home early and working from home are more important than winning,” Schmidt said during a talk at Stanford University in July in response to a question about why startups like OpenAI are leading the way in AI innovation. “And the reason startups work is because people work like crazy.” His remarks were first reported by Fortune.
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Schmidt is not the first CEO to rail against teleworking. Executives in companies from Morgan Stanley And Goldman Sachs To DellAmazon (AMZN), X and even more have made tough decisions – sometimes even threatening – Attitudes towards teleworking.
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Evidence on the impact of remote work on productivity is mixed. Some studies have found that Working from home increases productivity — as much as 24% – while others say the opposite.
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Google last year stricter remote working policies introduced. Employees’ attendance on site would be recorded to ensure they adhere to the three-day attendance per week rule, and managers could take their absences into account in performance reviews. The workforce as a whole has resisted such changes.
And although Google lags behind startups in AI, it remains one of the market leaders in this field among major technology companies. Investors reacted negatively to Google’s high spending on AI – and lack of clarity from CEO Sundar Pachai about when those costs will pay off. But Wedbush analyst Dan Ives used Google as an example of Big Tech’s AI success in a recent note to investors.
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Thanks to Google’s AI tools, the cloud division records record sales in the last quarter.
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