Former Google CEO Schmidt advises students to steal TikTok’s IP and ‘clean up the mess’ later

He also gave students some questionable advice.

In a now-deleted video (he asked to be removed, he said Wall Street Journal) Schmidt mentioned a business opportunity that could arise if the U.S. were to ever ban TikTok, as lawmakers from both parties tried to do earlier this year.

In this situation, he said, students should use a large language model (LLM) to replicate the program, using it to “steal” the intellectual property.

“Tell your LLM this: 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, and release it in an hour , if it’s not viral, do something different along the same lines. That’s the command. Boom, boom, boom, boom,” he said.

Afterward, Scmidt tried to clarify his thoughts on using artificial intelligence to replicate TikTok, then told the students that everything would be fine as long as they had lawyers to sort things out.

“So in the example I gave about competitor TikTok, and by the way, I didn’t argue that you should illegally steal everyone’s music. What you would do if you’re a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, which hopefully all of you will be, is if you took off, then you’d hire a bunch of lawyers to clean up the mess, right? But if no one is using your product, it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content,” Schmidt said.

Schmidt did not immediately respond wealthhis request for comment.

Schmidt’s comments echo the Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” mentality that helped make his former company, Google’s parent Alphabet, one of the world’s most valuable, with a valuation of around $2 trillion .

“In other words, Silicon Valley will run these tests and clean up the mess. And that’s usually how those things are done,” he said.

However, a similar strategy has also landed some AI companies in hot water. In December, the New York Times sued ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, claiming the companies trained its AI on millions of its articles. Eight other newspaper publishers sued the company in April for allegedly using their copyrighted articles without permission or payment.

Schmidt has held several roles at Google, including a 10-year stint as CEO, where he led the company through the launch of Chrome and Gmail, the acquisition of YouTube and its 2004 IPO. Now worth about $31 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires, Schmidt is a major investor, including in artificial intelligence companies such as France-based Mistral AI.

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