- Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai delivers the commencement speech at Stanford University
- Unlike other speakers, he does not mention AI
- Pichai provides life guidance and lessons to the new graduates
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai bucked the recent trend of speakers touting the benefits of artificial intelligence at university graduation speeches, but still faced an outcry against Google’s work in the Middle East.
Pichai gave the graduation speech at California’s Stanford University, where he chose not to mention the hot technology trend of the moment, but instead focused on his own life experience.
However, reports from the ceremony claimed that his speech was disrupted by a walk-out of around 200 students protesting Google’s role in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Life Lessons From Sundar Pichai
Pichai actually briefly hinted at mentioning AI without mentioning AI, noting how “people have also given me a lot of advice about what to say. Actually, it’s been the same advice, and it’s about what not to say. People thought it would be really hard for me; after all, it’s the last two letters of my last name.”
“Honestly, that topic is really irrelevant to what I want to share with you. The most timeless advice I’ve learned is technology agnostic. It’s about you, the life you want to build for yourself, and the choices that help you pursue that life.”
Local reports claimed that around 200 students walked out when Pichai took the stage, and smaller groups in the audience also caused disruption by waving banners and Palestinian flags and blowing whistles before also leaving the speech.
Google’s role in the conflict has been a source of controversy for some time, particularly the company’s $1.2 billion cloud-computing deal with the Israeli government known as Project Nimbus, which led to employee protests in 2022.
Pichai’s speech otherwise appeared to be well received as he recalled stories from his time at university and outlined his “three simple filters” which have “helped [him] get more moments right than wrong and take some of the pressure off”.
These were “choose optimism”, “attraction towards working on hard things” (in which he mentioned the “impossible problem” of building the Chrome browser) and “all else being equal, do what excites you”.
This was in stark contrast to one of his predecessors at Google, Eric Schmidt, whose recent University of Arizona commencement speech was heavily criticized and booed by attendees after he declared, “AI is going to touch everything,” even “if you don’t care about science.”
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