Tom Gruber
- Product designer and entrepreneur who uses AI technology to augment human intelligence, individually and collectively
- Innovator, Researcher, & Serial Startup Entrepreneur,
Tom Gruber Speaker Biography
Tom Gruber is a product designer and entrepreneur who uses AI technology to augment human intelligence, individually and collectively. He was cofounder, CTO, and head of design for the team that created Siri, the first intelligent assistant for everyone. At Apple for over eight years, Tom led the Advanced Development Group that designed and prototyped new capabilities for products that bring intelligence to the interface.
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. In addition to Siri, he has co-founded companies for helping travelers learn from the collective experience of others, enabling large communities of professionals to contribute to and learn from a collective body of knowledge, and creating music that adapts to the listener. Tom currently advises companies and organizations that use AI to have a positive impact on humanity, including leaders in collaboration, semantic search, natural language processing, mental health care, telehealth care, and assistive neurotechnology.
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Speech Topics
From Siri to AI Agents and Beyond: Navigating the Near Future with AI
AI is accelerating history at unprecedented speed, transforming how we work, learn, and live. This presentation offers historical context for understanding the modern AI revolution, tracing the technological journey from the World Wide Web to ChatGPT and looking ahead to Artificial General Intelligence. Drawing on 40 years in AI research and experience as co-founder and CTO of Siri, Gruber provides both technical insight and practical wisdom for navigating this transformative wave. Using the framework of “Humanistic AI,” he explores how to harness AI for augmentation of human work and collaboration with people rather than automation and competition with human work.
Topics covered in this presentation include:
- The technological confluence that enabled Siri and how it led to modern AI chatbots
- Understanding AI capabilities and critical limitations, including the “hallucination” problem
- The concept of AI as a “Language Savant” – what this means for practical applications
- Industry transformation across software engineering, creative services, and beyond
- The potential for AI to address global challenges in education, mental health, and scientific discovery
- How organizations can choose between automation vs. augmentation strategies
- The democratizing potential of AI to bring transformative benefits to everyone
- The presentation concludes with an optimistic vision of how AI’s software-based nature enables global distribution of intelligent services, potentially solving problems that have been left unsolved for too long. Includes Q&A session exploring practical implications for individuals and organizations.
AI, Big Data, and Humanity in 2024: Our new relationship with AI
The latest AI models based on planetary scale LLMs with intelligent interfaces such as ChatGPT are changing our relationship with AI. This presentation is an excellent overview of the latest models, what makes them possible, how they are created, what they are great at, what to be careful with, and the exciting applications that they enable. Gruber brings decades of experience in large scale AI systems whose mastery of language changes the game. Topics covered in this presentation include:
How to think about AI chatbots and use them in your life
- How Siri, Deep Learning, Transformers, and GPU hardware led to the current generation
- Application of these models to industries such as software engineering, creative services, education, health care, and mental health care.
- The potential risks to individuals and society from ungoverned applications
- The future of Personalized AI
- Included is a Q&A session with things to think about how this technology could impact your life.
Navigating the Startup Ecosystem
In 2010 Siri was purchased by Apple and remains central to the user experience of all Apple products. Today, Siri is used more than a billion time a day 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? In this virtual keynote, 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, showing how viewers can put these principles into practice with their own ventures.
What AI and Big Data Can Do for Humanity
In this keynote, Tom shares his insights into the power and potential of big data and AI, with examples of how things can go wrong — and the potential for doing things right. He reveals the role of AI within social media platforms and details how its misuse has led to over-optimization for profit and unintended consequences for humanity. To counter this concerning trend, Tom offers examples of AI that is optimized for human mental health and well being.
A Guiding Philosophy for Artificial Intelligence Entrepreneurs and Investors
In this talk, Tom reviews key projects in his career and offers the principals on which they were chosen and factors that led to success. He describes a key insight he learned from inventor Doug Engelbart, the formulation of a guiding philosophy, which can help entrepreneurs, researchers, and investors make decisions in their careers.
