Google is one of the companies leading the AI revolution.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai, however, made no mention of that during his commencement speech to Stanford University graduates on Sunday — and for good reason.
Students relentlessly booed one of Pichai’s predecessors, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, when he praised the promise of AI during his own commencement speech at the University of Arizona last month. Students also booed Big Machine Records CEO Scott Borchetta when he talked about AI at Middle Tennessee State University.
“I know today is about giving you all advice,” Pichai told the graduates. “But people have also been giving me a lot of advice on what to say. Actually, it’s been the same advice, and it’s about what not to say.”
While videos of the graduation later posted to social media showed dozens of students walking out of the ceremony in protest, some of them carrying Palestinian flags, that was the closest he came in his speech to acknowledging the disdain many young people have for the technology these days.
He did risk a light joke: “People thought it would be really difficult for me,” he said. “It is the last two letters of my last name, after all.”
Pichai instead told graduates to “choose optimism,” which may have been a subtle reference to their likely anxiety about the impact AI is having on entry-level work, and he described how he learned to maintain a positive mindset.
When he first arrived in California in the 1990s, Pichai said he expected to find a lush, green landscape. Instead, he said, all he saw was brown — until his host corrected him and said the word he was looking for was “golden.”
The bigger lesson for graduates, he said, is in how to reframe something unappealing into something full of promise.
“That’s exactly what I mean by choosing optimism. It’s about reframing for the positive: Where I saw brown, she saw golden,” Pichai said. “This slight change of perspective had a huge ripple effect on how I thought about the world around me.”
Students just starting their careers can perhaps be forgiven for struggling to see the world through golden-tinted glasses.
The people building the products fueling the world’s AI makeover, like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, have repeatedly warned that AI could render traditional entry-level jobs obsolete.
Over a dozen major companies have cited AI in layoffs this year. And recent graduates have told Business Insider that they’ve been searching for months for full-time jobs to no avail.
Pichai, a Stanford alum, has led Google since 2015 and seen several waves of technology pass through Silicon Valley. AI, however, has brought about a level of change humans haven’t seen before, he said on a recent episode of the “Hard Fork” podcast.
“These graduates are actually both going to be a big part of driving that progress and also dealing with the impact,” he said, referring to AI.
