Tech Leader's Public Statement

A commencement speech by yet another titan of industry has been met with disapproval from graduates. Google is, once again, the company associated with the speaker, but this time the issue isn’t AI per se, but company involvement with Israel. According to the Information’s Erin Woo, a speech by Google CEO Sundar Pichai was protested in the form of a walkout, along with chants of 'Free, free Palestine' and 'Shame on you.' Well over 100 Stanford students walked out of Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s commencement speech at Stanford just now, chanting 'Free, free Palestine.' Google and Amazon have a joint contract called Project Nimbus with the Israeli military and government. The contract is reportedly worth $1.2 billion—or 4 billion shekels according to Israel—and provides Israel with cloud computing, advanced AI, and more. Reports about the actual details of Project Nimbus come largely from leaks. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has criticized the companies for their alleged lack of transparency around Project Nimbus. One of Pichai’s predecessors, Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was loudly booed during his commencement speech at a University of Arizona commencement ceremony about a month ago. The booing took place when Schmidt touched on AI, and I wrote at the time that Schmidt failed to read the room. That does appear to have been the case, but later reporting made it clear that some of the booing was likely premeditated. Schmidt was already a controversial speaker because of his possible ties to Jeffrey Epstein, and some of the disruption reportedly involved graduates shouting 'Epstein files! Epstein files!' In February, 900 Google staffers called for transparency about Google’s ties to the federal government over concerns that its technology was abetting the Trump Administration’s immigration crackdowns.