Google’s Sundar Pichai chose optimism over AI at Stanford. Graduates walked out anyway
The man who runs one of the world’s largest artificial-intelligence companies stood up to address Stanford’s graduating class and, for the most part, declined to talk about artificial intelligence. Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google and Alphabet, gave the address at the university’s 135th commencement on Sunday 14 June, in Stanford Stadium, and chose almost everything except the subject he is best known for.
He acknowledged the omission with a joke. The pressure to discuss AI, he said, was hard to escape given the last two letters of his surname, before pivoting to advice he described as “technology agnostic.”
It was a calculated swerve. Technology executives have had a rough graduation season: Eric Schmidt, Pichai’s predecessor at Google, was booed at the University of Arizona this year for praising AI’s promise, and Pichai appeared determined not to repeat the experience.
What he offered instead was autobiography organised around three...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to thenextweb.com. To see the full text click HERE
