Long before Lorenzo Santavicca, a 2018 James Madison College graduate in international relations, was helping teams at Google DeepMind navigate some of the complex challenges in artificial intelligence, he got the chance to learn how to bring people together amid uncertainty at Michigan State University.
Santavicca served as president of the Associated Students of Michigan State University, or ASMSU, for two terms, from 2016 to 2018. During that time, he represented nearly 40,000 students, oversaw a $1.8 million budget and managed a staff of student peers in executive roles. He was also recognized with the prestigious Student Body President of the Year Award in 2018, for his strong and effective leadership.
“MSU is a massive enterprise but has extraordinary talent wherever you look, from faculty and staff to incredible, bright-minded students,” he says.
The experience taught him how to navigate a large organizational structure — something he’s also doing at Google, where he’s currently a senior technical program manager for Gemini Data at Google DeepMind.
Finding meaning in leadership
Santavicca grew up in Macomb, Michigan, and toured MSU early in the process of deciding which college to attend. James Madison College, the university’s residential college focused on public affairs, caught his attention. “I was always very civically minded and felt immediately at home in James Madison College, seeing the small class size relative to the big campus and realizing you can get a bit of both.”
MSU was going through a period of turmoil when Santavicca was ASMSU president. To him, it was a learning opportunity in navigating a highly ambiguous environment.
“It was a pivotal time to be at the forefront of student leadership,” he recalls. “I learned to appreciate various perspectives, empathize with those who were calling into question university leadership and asking: ‘What does it mean to be a Spartan who cares about others?’ ‘What does it mean to believe and trust in an institution?’”
At Google, Santavicca is part of an organization that employs over 190,000. “In my role, I partner with diverse teams in AI model development to surface and solve high-stakes problems effectively,” he says. “Having had that experience very early at MSU, managing large budgets and a staff, has helped me be a great peer mentor and an effective leader at Google now.”
After graduating from MSU, Santavicca started in a role at Google that was focused on legal data disclosure to law enforcement. It piqued his interest in the relationship between privacy and user data, leading him to pursue a role dealing with privacy compliance at Google.
Later, he transitioned into roles involving search, ads, maps and shopping. Yet another evolution in his career at Google led him to the AI domain. Over the past year, he’s been working “to make Gemini a helpful and trustworthy product that people can use in their day-to-day.”
For Santavicca, the through line across these roles is trust, something he firmly connects to his time at MSU.
“Systems and institutions are only as good as the people behind them, right?” he asks. “Especially as we think about AI, I’ve been working on what it means to be able to put a product out there that is trustworthy and that people want to use.”
Advancing the frontiers of AI
At DeepMind, Santavicca occupies a position between research and engineering. As senior technical program manager, he helps some of the brightest minds working to advance the Gemini AI model to navigate the data they need to train it.
“In close partnership with research and engineering, I help ensure the platform for data iteration in model training continues to push the AI frontier forward,” he says. “Ultimately, my role comes down to maintaining research momentum across multiple data-related programs and technologies, which in turn helps the model advance its capabilities.”
There’s no doubt that it’s an exciting time to be where the AI action is. For Santavicca, it’s equal parts rewarding and challenging.
“It is such an unprecedented opportunity to help shape what is expected to be one of the key technologies of our time,” he says. “I think for me, it feels very exciting to be able to see and experience firsthand what it means to research and show the model improving from a perspective that maybe we hadn't expected before.”
“Spartans think about hard problems like this. I’m using my degree and my experiences at Michigan State in a way that can benefit this new environment that we’re in right now.” - Lorenzo Santavicca
As he guides Google colleagues toward breakthroughs, Santavicca senses echoes of the lessons he has learned along the way, including those from his time at MSU.
“From high school and even before, my whole academic journey has revolved around leadership and bringing people together, finding ways to bridge connections in order to serve a bigger good, whether that’s in a professional setting now or even back then, just on a friendly level.”
He approaches the AI model he’s helping to shape from a people-centered perspective as well.
“This technology is really important from the perspective of ‘Can it help us do more things?’” Santavicca says. “If we can’t help understand and communicate what it’s doing and why it’s doing it and what the purpose is, people aren’t going to want to use it unless they can buy into that.”
Santavicca feels that he can rise to the challenges associated with that work — tackling these unknown, unsolved problems — because of what MSU taught him.
“Spartans think about hard problems like this. I’m using my degree and my experiences at Michigan State in a way that can benefit this new environment that we’re in right now.”
Staying Spartan throughout and inspiring the next generation
Even though Santavicca has been away from MSU for a few years now, he still feels connected to Spartans wherever he finds himself.
When he was working at the Google offices in Austin, Texas, he led the Austin Spartans Alumni Club. Now based in Mountain View, California, Santavicca is leading the Silicon Valley Spartans, too, as their newly elected president.
“If I think about my identity as a Spartan, it’s someone who wants to connect, help and be a change agent for the common good,” Santavicca says.
“At Michigan State, we learn to confront the world’s unsolved challenges. To me, a Spartan is defined by how they lean into complexity, a trait that unites our global community well beyond East Lansing. I learned that in James Madison and in leadership with ASMSU, saw it in action in Austin, Texas, and experience it daily here in Silicon Valley.”
Within the rapidly evolving generative AI landscape that Santavicca knows better than most, he has concrete advice for Spartans who want to become AI-ready in their careers.
Becoming “AI-native” will be crucial, he stresses.
“Anyone who is graduating from Michigan State should be able to demonstrate how they’re using tools within the AI space that help them think about problems that are unsolved today, that help improve their workflow and help them be effective at their jobs,” he says.
“I think we’re going to see institutions, especially as they’re adopting AI, expect us to deliver more. I think using AI to help remove mundane or monotonous things from our plates helps us think about bigger and larger tasks that are coming our way.”
When it comes to his own future, Santavicca is ready and open to the unknown.
“There are a lot of exciting and tough questions being asked right now, especially as we think about safety with AI,” he reflects. “We’re hearing reports of model capabilities that we need to be able to safeguard against and, I think, for me continuing to think about my interest in the common good and making meaningful progress is a really exciting space to be in.”
Content note: The views and opinions expressed in this interview are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Google DeepMind.
