Stanford grads walk out on Google CEO Sundar Pichai speech

Venn1

Tech leaders from this era will not be remembered well.

wxw

What was the speech on?

gritspants

Seems this has more to do with Palestine and Google's involvement with Israel to provide cloud computing.

smashah

Good kids - proud of them.

sva_

I wonder what percentage of total graduates walked out? The video shows maybe around 50 people at all. The title makes it seem like everyone graduating walked out.

stevenwoo

I went to the Electrical Engineering ceremony, the only speakers were from the faculty and one newly minted B.S.E.E. I biked there and saw there were a lot of smaller ceremonies across the campus outside of the stadium the photo captures.

arjie

Speech itself was kind of fun: https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/s... Pretty light hearted, and honestly considering that he's given a speech to an empty stadium before (as referenced in the first few sentences, I think he'll have handled it just fine. > 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. People thought it would be really difficult for me; it is the last two letters of my last name, after all. Ha, chuckle-worthy. Of course he'd find it hard to not pitch AI. The only thing I find surprising is no-one points out that Stanford is a truly elite education system: Some 2 in 5 of students enter disabled, but almost all of them end up successful over time.

Gagarin1917

I wish I’d skipped my graduation ceremony as well. What a complete waste of time.

jfkeinfmsn38

Everyone loves the "free Palestine" slogan, but I've never actually seen the people who call it offer a concrete realistic solution that could achieve that - is it a two state solution? Is it a one state solution that will burst into a civil war? What's the plan? What does it actually look like? I still think a two state solution is the only realistic plan.

happytoexplain

Regardless of the details of this speech, I believe Sundar Pichai is uncommonly out of touch with reality and with the nation of the United States of America, even among tech CEOs. He should step down.

ChrisArchitect

Associated story released after: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/sundar-pichai-stanford-c...