Fortune Tech: Google’s AI rebuild, Anthropic’s big hire, SpaceX plans for Cursor
Fortune Tech: Google’s AI rebuild, Anthropic’s big hire, SpaceX plans for Cursor
https://fortune.com/2026/05/20/google-i-o-2026/
Publish Date: 2026-05-20 06:02:00
Source Domain: fortune.com
Good morning. You’d think more commencement speakers would ask their AI chatbot of choice how today’s college graduates feel about artificial intelligence before declaring it the future while the ink is still drying on the grads’ degrees.
It’s been a rough couple of weeks. Real estate executive Gloria Caulfield was the first to prominently step into the muck at the University of Central Florida. Then came former Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the University of Arizona and Big Machine CEO Scott Borchetta at Middle Tennessee State. All endured waves of boos for their focus on AI.
If you read the transcripts, the speakers were (mostly) trying to give agency to their audience at a time of great transformation. But they didn’t read the room. Today’s grads don’t want to hear about technology; they want to hear about themselves.
The gold standard for this, of course, is Steve Jobs at Stanford in 2005. The late Apple co-founder only mentions the word “technology” once in 15 minutes, opting instead to share three personal stories. “Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking,” he advises at one point. Little did he know how much the Class of 2026 would take that to heart. —Andrew Nusca
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Google is being completely rebuilt for AI
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai in Mountain View, California on May 19, 2026.
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images
AI was the overwhelming focus during two hours of keynote presentations delivered by executives at Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, in Silicon Valley on Tuesday.
In a very visible sign of how important AI has become to the $4.7 trillion company, Google said it was redesigning the iconic search box to be larger (to better accommodate natural language queries) and facilitate the use of AI agents for complex research projects.
Google unveiled new Gemini 3.5 AI models at…