When Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed the company’s annual I/O Developers Conference on May 18, 2021, he made two announcements suggesting Google is now the world’s most powerful organization in education. Opening the livestreamed keynote from the Mountain View campus gardens, Pichai celebrated how Google had been able to “help students and teachers continue learning from anywhere” during the pandemic. Minutes later, he announced Google’s new AI language platform, a central part of the company’s long-term AI strategy, with a specific use-case example from education. LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), he claimed, could enable students to ask natural language questions and receive sensible, factual, and interesting conversational responses. “So if a student wanted to discover more about space,” Pichai wrote on the company blog , “the model would give sensible responses, making learning even more fun and engaging. If that student then wanted to switch over to a different topic,” he added, “LaMDA could continue the conversation without any retraining.” The company plan is to embed LaMDA in its Workspace suite of cloud computing tools, software, and products. These proclamations indicate how Google plans to advance its business in education following the disruptions of COVID-19—by consolidating the huge growth of its platforms in schools and integrating AI into teaching and learning. That’s raising fresh concerns among privacy campaigners and researchers because it gives Google access to data about students and schools at international scale. Google’s global classroom With schools reopening worldwide, Google has worked hard to ensure the big market gains it made in 2020 can be sustained and strengthened as students return to physical rather than virtual classrooms
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Google’s plans to bring AI to education make its dominance in classrooms more alarming