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My fellow AI explorers

Thousands of graduates in caps and gowns turned their backs on a billionaire at a podium, booing loud enough to drown out his microphone. Then, two days later, the CEO of Google sat down with journalists and admitted, quietly, that he understands why people are scared.

In today’s edition:

• 🎓 A Generation Says No: Why the class of 2026 is done playing nice about AI

• 🧠 Sundar Pichai's Honest Moment: The Google CEO addresses the anxiety nobody at I/O wanted to talk about

A Generation Says No

The Class of 2026 Is Booing. The Numbers Explain Why.

It started with one speaker. Then another. Then another. By this week, it had become a pattern so consistent that journalists were calling it a commencement season story. And the headline that captured it best is not printable in a family newsletter.

Here's what actually happened across multiple campuses this graduation season:

• Real estate executive Gloria Caulfield called AI the "next industrial revolution" at the University of Central Florida. Immediate boos.

• Music CEO Scott Borchetta told graduates at Middle Tennessee State, "It's a tool. Make it work for you." He responded to the booing with: "Deal with it." That went well.

• Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed nearly without interruption for minutes at the University of Arizona in what was the loudest, longest, and most sustained reaction of the season.

One student who was in the crowd at Arizona put it plainly: "I can speak for a lot of us when I say we kind of feel like guinea pigs."

Here is what makes this more than a vibe. Senator Josh Hawley put a number on it this week: 30 to 40 percent of recent graduates are unemployed, and many of them blame AI. Job postings across the U.S. have dropped roughly 32% since ChatGPT launched, according to Federal Reserve data. Gen Z representation at large tech companies has been cut in half in two years. Once-lucrative entry-level paths (coding, legal research, writing, translation) have been hit hardest.

The speakers weren't entirely wrong in what they said. AI is genuinely transformative. Adaptability is genuinely necessary. But standing at a podium worth a combined $20+ billion in personal wealth and telling a room full of unemployed 22-year-olds to "embrace the tools" is not a message. It's a category error.

What the graduates are booing isn't the technology. It's the framing. They're being asked to absorb the disruption, adapt on their own dime, and trust that the gains will eventually trickle their way… from the same people who built the systems that displaced them and who will be fine regardless of how it turns out.

🧠 The takeaway: This is not a PR problem for the AI industry. It's a legitimacy problem. And the booing is just the version of this that gets filmed and goes viral. The version that doesn't get filmed is 40% of a graduating class quietly concluding that the people building AI don't actually have their interests in mind. That conclusion, once formed, is very hard to reverse.

Check out the full story on Yahoo News here →

Sundar Pichai's Honest Moment

The Google CEO Walks Into the Room Where the Booing Happened. And Actually Listens.

Google I/O this week was, predictably, an AI showcase of stunning scale. New search interface. Gemini Omni. Agentic coding that built a full operating system from scratch in 12 hours. The future, laid out in real time on a stage in Mountain View.

But the most interesting moment of the week wasn't on stage. It was in a podcast interview with the NYT's Hard Fork, where Sundar Pichai was asked directly how he's responding to growing evidence that the public is souring on AI, and what advice he'd give to college graduates frightened by the job market they're walking into.

Here's what made the interview worth paying attention to:

• Pichai acknowledged that fear about AI and jobs is legitimate, not a misunderstanding to be corrected with better messaging.

• He was asked about Dario Amodei's claim that AI could erode half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. He said, "I respect that. I think it's important to voice those concerns and debate them."

• On the question of whether today's AI is on an absolute path to AGI, he paused: "You've always had these technology curves where you may hit a temporary plateau. So are we currently on an absolute path to AGI? I don't think anyone can say for sure."

• He described the current moment as a "societal disruption" that needs to be worked through, and not solved by messaging.

He also made a striking claim about where Google sees things heading: today's AI will look like an old flip phone in three years. Every engineer will have a team of agents. Agentic workflows will be mainstream by 2027. That's the optimist's arc.

But here's what I think the interview actually revealed: even the CEO of the company leading the AI race is operating in genuine uncertainty about what the labor market implications are. He's not hiding a plan. There isn't one yet.

That's either reassuring or terrifying depending on your vantage point. If you're a founder or investor, the uncertainty is the opportunity. If you're a 22-year-old with student debt and no callbacks, "we're working through the societal disruption" is not a landing pad.

🔮 Prediction: Pichai's willingness to acknowledge the anxiety is a signal that the big labs are starting to understand they have a trust problem, not just a communication problem. Expect more of this careful, genuine-sounding engagement with the fear over the next 12 months. Whether the engagement is followed by concrete policy or workforce investment will determine whether it was substance or strategy.

Listen to the full podcast here →

30-Second AI Play

🎬 Edit Any Video Just by Talking to It: Google's Gemini Omni Is Live

Google dropped Gemini Omni at I/O this week. It’s a model that takes any combination of text, images, audio, and video as input, generates high-fidelity video, and lets you keep editing it through plain conversation. Here's how to use it today:

Step 1: Open the Gemini app (AI Plus subscribers) or access it via YouTube Shorts and YouTube Create, and it’s rolling out this week, free.

Step 2: Upload a video clip or generate one from scratch. Type or speak what you want changed: "Make the lighting warmer," "Add motion blur to the background," or "Make it feel like a time lapse."

Step 3: Gemini edits conversationally. You stay in chat. No timeline, no keyframes, no export/re-import cycle.

Step 4: Every clip ships with an invisible SynthID watermark and C2PA Content Credentials, verifiable inside the Gemini app, Chrome, and Search. Provenance is baked in.

The catch you should know about: Speech and audio editing inside existing video is deliberately withheld. Google is still figuring out how to release that responsibly. The deepfake risk is too real right now, especially in an election cycle. Audio generation for new clips works fine. Editing existing audio does not. Yet.

💡 Pro tip: The 10-second cap on generated clips isn't a model limitation. It's a rollout decision. Google expects most users won't need longer. Start there, test the physics and motion quality, and treat this as the iPhone camera moment for conversational video editing.

Other Relevant AI News!

🕵️ The White House just approved a secret $9 billion for spy agencies to acquire Nvidia's Blackwell chips. All because classified AI networks are falling behind on the same chip shortage affecting frontier labs. Anthropic has had rolling Claude outages due to demand. Now the CIA is rationing compute. The chip crunch is real at every level.

🧬 A 25-year loneliness researcher just issued a stark warning. AI companions may be making the disconnection crisis worse, not better. A 2025 APA survey found that half of adults feel isolated, and studies now show AI companionship brings short-term comfort but increases distress markers over time. The $37 billion AI companion market has a problem it doesn't want to talk about.

💰 John Doerr, the VC behind Google and Amazon, published a major opinion piece in the WSJ this week arguing that AI represents a once-in-a-generation investment opportunity, but only if the U.S. moves decisively to build out infrastructure and workforce retraining in parallel. The man who "sees the future first" is ringing a bell.

🦊 Fox News weighed in on the graduation booing story from a different angle. The political fallout is widening as Republican and Democratic legislators alike start acknowledging that Gen Z's AI anxiety is a voting issue now, not just a cultural one.

Golden Nuggets

• 🎓 The graduation booing isn't a story about rude students. It's a leading indicator of a political movement forming around AI and economic displacement… and it's building faster than the industry is ready for.

• 🧠 Sundar Pichai saying "I don't think anyone can say for sure" about AGI is the most honest thing a major AI CEO has said in public in months. Sit with that.

• 🎬 Gemini Omni's deliberate choice to withhold audio-editing of existing video is the right call. And the fact that Google made it publicly shows the labs are at least thinking about the deepfake problem before shipping.

Would love to hear your thoughts! Send me your thoughts by replying to this email (yes, I read them all :)

Until our next AI rendezvous,

Anthony | Founder of Uncover AI