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Tom Gruber
About
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Biography Highlights
- Tom Gruber is an AI product developer, inventor, designer, humanist, and ocean advocate. He was cofounder, CTO, and head of design for the team that created Siri, the first intelligent assistant for everyone. In 2010 Siri was purchased by Apple and remains central to the user experience of all Apple products. Today, Siri is used more than 25 billion times a month in dozens of languages around the world.
Biography
Tom Gruber’s background
Tom’s professional career spans four decades, from graduate school during the classical AI period, through research at Stanford during the dawn of the Web, through founding a series of companies, to his present incarnation as speaker, writer, and impact advisor. Throughout his career Tom has pursued the question of how technology can help us live better lives. Applying ideas from artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and design, Tom’s work explores how connecting people and machines can foster collaboration, learning, knowledge sharing, and getting things done. Many of the innovations Tom created or influenced are taken for granted today, woven into the pattern of our digitally mediated lives.
As a speaker and writer, Tom advocates for what he calls Humanistic AI: Artificial Intelligence that augments and collaborates with humans, vs. competing with or replacing them. Leveraging his decades in AI development, Tom offers guiding principles and practical advice about how to make ethical choices when applying this powerful technology. In his main stage TED talk in 2017, Tom introduced the guiding philosophy of Humanistic AI. He shared his vision for a future where AI helps us achieve superhuman performance in perception, creativity and cognitive function.
A driving force in Tom’s work has been applications that augment human intelligence, individually and collectively. People need better ways to communicate, remember, learn from each other, and access the world’s knowledge. If you use Siri on your phone, learn from a threaded discussion on the Web, collaborate with colleagues in a virtual workspace, or use a computer to help you speak, it is likely that Tom helped invent it, influenced its development, or was designing an early version of it before it entered the mainstream.
As a serial entrepreneur, inventor, and designer of AI applications, Tom reached a career milestone with the sale of Siri to Apple in 2010. He stayed on to lead the Advanced Development Group, where he could explore dozens of new product ideas. After eight years at Apple, Tom “retired” to pursue Impact Advising, investing his time and expertise to maximize human impact.
Tom uses the guiding principles of Humanistic AI to curate his advisory portfolio. The companies and organizations he advises all use AI to augment humans for the benefit of society. From alternative gaming applications that optimize for self care and compassion to a wearable headset that allows you to speak with your brain, the products of these companies show how Humanistic AI applications can be instrumental in our ability to understand ourselves and our environment.
Tom is presently co-founder and CTO of LifeScore, which is creating a new way to experience music. Adaptive music is dynamically composed and produced as it plays, which allows it to adapt to contexts, personal needs, and the state of the listener.
For Tom, conservation photography is both a creative passion and an essential mission. He is privileged to travel around the world to dive in places where marine life still thrives. Through the medium of underwater photography and video, he hopes to create an empathy and connection with the natural world. As a technologist and entrepreneur, he’s working to ignite a change in global awareness, and a fundamental shift in the way we view our relationship with the ocean.
Above all, Tom is a humanist who believes in the potential of technology to support human collaboration and knowledge sharing and have a positive influence in the world. He’s dedicated his life as an innovator, artist and entrepreneur to advocating for the ethical use of technology that enhances our lives and protects the environment that sustains us.
Videos
Topics
Superhuman Potential: The Promise of Humanistic AI
The landscape of AI today is as exciting as it is complex, fraught with unknowns and exponential potential. What is the proper role of AI in relation to humanity? How do we build planetary scale AI-driven systems that deliver outcomes we want while avoiding unintended consequences? In this thought-provoking talk, Tom leverages his decades in AI development and lays out a clear ethical choice. The key lies in aligning the objective of the machine with human values: programming AI to augment and collaborate with us for the betterment of humanity. Taking a philosophical and prescriptive approach, Tom describes real-world applications from his front-row seat as advisor to over a dozen companies at the forefront of humanistic AI applications. Offering both a rallying cry and a roadmap for the future, Tom shows the way to harness and direct this powerful, pervasive technology for good.
How to Build the Future: Practical Principles for Startup Founders
In 2010 Siri was purchased by Apple and remains central to the user experience of all Apple products. Today, Siri is used more than 25 billion times a month in over 30 countries around the world. But in late 2007 when Tom and his co-founders launched their fledgling startup, none of this was guaranteed. Why did top VC firms first invest in the company, even as the sky was falling in financial markets? Tom outlines four key factors that led to Siri’s success — factors that are essential to any successful startup. He shares insider details of Siri’s trajectory, while providing real-world examples from other companies, showing how attendees can put these principles into practice with their own ventures.
AI, Big Data, and Humanity: Risks and Opportunities
Artificial Intelligence, operating on big data, opens a world of possibilities to improve how we work, play, learn, and take care of ourselves. This talk offers a cautionary tale of AI and data leading to unforeseen negative outcomes when harnessed by some of the largest companies in the world, and how a new crop of startups are using AI in a new way to foster human health and well being. Examples of applications include health care, assistive care, and mental health – and recent work using AI to help with the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing from his direct experience building planetary-scale AI and advising a new generation of Humanistic AI companies, Tom offers insights to entrepreneurs, investors, and policy makers navigating the high-stakes decisions of AI today.
Semantic Computing: It’s Actually Here. What Will You Do With It?
Semantic computing has now reached the technical threshold where machines can read and understand the facts in almost everything you read, and everything else you might read. And today audio and video can be transcribed routinely, so machines can also read and remember the content of our conversations and sources of entertainment. What applications does this new AI competence unlock? What happens when we augment our individual and collective memories with AI? Tom reveals the landscape of new possibilities and offers a peek over the horizon to what might be accomplished — and how things might go off course — with this exciting new capability.
The Generation That Will Save the Ocean
Earth’s ocean is in immediate peril from climate change, pollution, and unsustainable fishing. We have one generation left to save it. Who will be the people to change the attitudes and behavior of billions around the world? They are the next generation of scientists, engineers, artists, and activists who were born digital and raised social. What will they need to do to turn the tide? In this rousing talk, Tom applies his inventor’s mind for innovation with his entrepreneur’s penchant for leadership, and lays out a roadmap for how we can move our relationship to the ocean from exploitation by the few to stewardship by us all.
Colorful Lives: Photographic Stories from the Ocean
Experience the colorful lives of underwater animals through the lens of art photography. Learn about the surprising sex lives of famous animated fish, the bizarre mating habits of punk-rock nudibranchs, and the majestic grace of the largest fish in the ocean. See the adorable playfulness of sea lions up close, and then consider the message they have for us about our relationship to the ocean. Tom is in love with life in the ocean, and is privileged to travel around the world to dive in places where marine life still thrives. With his underwater photography and video, he hopes to bring back and share what he sees to create empathy and connection with the ocean.