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A.I. Leaders’ Advice for 2026 College Graduates Shows the Limit of Silicon Valley Optimism

At a moment of anxiety about jobs and the future, commencement speeches in 2026 became a referendum on both A.I. and the people selling it.

In recent weeks, a slate of today’s most prominent tech figures—Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, AMD CEO Lisa Su, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, among others—took the podium at university commencements to address an anxious Class of 2026, the first cohort to spend their entire college years alongside generative A.I. tools. (ChatGPT was launched in November 2022, during their freshman year.) Across campuses, the industry leaders behind those podiums delivered a broadly similar message: embrace A.I., but learn to master it. How that message landed, however, depended less on what was said than on who said it—and, perhaps, where it was said.

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The starkest contrast........

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