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 filters: choose optimism, work on hard things, and do what genuinely excites you. The optimism came with an origin story.
Arriving from Chennai for his first winter quarter, Pichai looked out at hills he saw as brown and was corrected by his host, Jane Earl, who told him, “We prefer to call it golden.”
