Ex-Google CEO: AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to 'clean up the mess'

Essentially he is arguing that you should try and figure out the licensing later. Because why pay licenses or lawyers if it doesn’t sell?

> So, in the example that I gave of the TikTok competitor — and by the way, I was not arguing that you should illegally steal everybody’s music — what you would do if you’re a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, which hopefully all of you will be, is if it took off, then you’d hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up, right? But if nobody uses your product, it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content.

He seems to realize that people may take issue with this approach.

> And do not quote me.

Isn’t he describing what big companies can do? They can copy startups using their giant cash reserves and use lawyers and frivolous patents to make it difficult to challenge them.

All the sketchy people know that, but they don't say it in public.

> [...] during a recent talk at Stanford

Minting the next batch of sketchy people.

The playbook of "Do something legally gray > raise funding & expand > pivot away from legally gray OR employ lawyers to make it not legally gray" is basically the standard playbook of startups, the examples are countless: AirBnb, YouTube, Spotify, Uber, OpenAI, etc, etc...

I'm sure it isn't always a bad idea, but struggling to come up with good examples for when the outcome from doing so have been more than just "shareholder value went up".

Another absurd and less covered part of the speech is this:

> If TikTok is banned, here's what I propose each and every one of you do.

> Say to your LLM 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, release it and in one hour, if it's not viral, do something different along the same lines.

> That's the command.

> Boom, boom, boom, boom.

He doesn't really think anything even similar to this would work, does he??