Co-founder of Siri, Tom is a product designer and entrepreneur who uses AI technology to augment human intelligence.
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Tom Gruber is a product Designer and entrepreneur who uses AI technology to augment human intelligence. He was cofounder, CTO, and head of design for the team that created Siri, the first intelligent assistant for everyone. Tom’s career spans four decades, from graduate school, through research at Stanford, 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. 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 woven into the pattern of our digitally mediated lives.
Humanistic AI
Should the technology be used to compete or collaborate with humans? Tom has guided his work in AI along the latter path.
Innovations
A driving force in Tom’s work has been applications that augment human intelligence, individually and collectively.
Speaking
Tom Speaks on topics ranging from AI’s impact on society, successful startup insights, and ocean advocacy. Schedule Tom as a keynote speaker today.
Writing
As an innovator, researcher, and entrepreneur, Tom gives readers a front-row seat to what it means to envision the future, then set about building it.
Writing | Featured Talks | Media & Press
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Media + PressForging Humanistic AI | Interview for UX Magazine’s Invisible Machines Podcast | June 2024
Hosts Robb Wilson and Josh Tyson, talk with Tom about the enduring relevance of his early work designing a computer system that enabled non-verbal people with severe physical disabilities to communicate using natural language.Read More
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Media + PressLifeScore Debut | Twitch.tv | Artificial Show | 2020
Showrunner Bernie Su and LifeScore Co-Founder Tom Gruber show off the LifeScore interactive music platform where the audience controls the music. Tom demonstrates music being automatically adapted in real time for the first time ever.Read More
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PresentationAI, 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…Read More
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Blog|6 MIN. READLanguage Savants: Risks and Opportunities of Generative BS
This essay introduced the metaphor of language savants in early 2023 as a short speech delivered to a CEO event.Read More
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PresentationIntelligence at the Interface: The Virtual Assistant Paradigm for Human Computer Interaction
BayCHI is the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction. This talk explores the virtual assistant metaphor as an interaction paradigm, like mouse-and-menu or multi-touch. What does it enable? Who does it empower? What are the drivers of usability and utility? What makes…Read More
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PresentationSiri: A Virtual Personal Assistant (2009)
In 2009 — a year before Siri was launched — Tom introduced Siri to a technical audience, laying out the key problems to be solved and the technologies involved. The talk includes an early demo of the working system, which had not yet been released to the public. A classic!Read More
Humanistic AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is about making machines that can do intelligent things. Today the technology rivals humans on many fronts. How do we guide the application of AI to achieve its greatest potential while avoiding unintended consequences? Should the technology be used to compete with humans, automating our work, or should it collaborate with humans, augmenting our cognitive abilities? Tom has guided his work in AI along the latter path. He calls it Humanistic AI.
Speaker
Tom has a unique ability to break down complex ideas into stories and concepts that everyone can understand. A true polymath, he leverages his diverse experience to make connections across technology, research, design, startups, and environmental advocacy. Audiences leave Tom’s talks with their minds expanded, their assumptions challenged, and an optimistic view of where our minds and our technology can take us.
SPEAKING CLIENTS
Impact Advisor
As an AI innovator and serial entrepreneur, Tom uses the guiding principles of Humanistic AI to curate his advisory portfolio. The companies and organizations Tom advises use AI to augment humans for the benefit of society, as well as creating thriving businesses that will continue to innovate into the future. Read on to hear a few of their stories, and learn how they’re making a difference in the world today.
Innovations
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. A driving force in Tom’s work has been applications that augment human intelligence, individually and collectively. Many of the innovations Tom created or influenced are taken for granted today, woven into the pattern of our digitally mediated lives.
Ocean Advocate
Our Oceans are in peril. Fossil fuels are destroying the reefs, plastics are killing the wildlife, and industrial fishing is pillaging the commons. Tom believes it is worth fighting hard, now, to save the ocean during our lifetimes. He is working to ignite a change in global awareness and a fundamental shift in the way we view our relationship with the ocean.
Photographer
For Tom, photography is a passion and a mission. With conservation photography, he hopes to create empathy and a connection with a natural world that is rapidly vanishing. Tom has the privilege of travelling to and experiencing some of the last truly wild places on earth, and he has dedicated his creative energies to bringing back images that show the beauty of the life and ecosystems we are in danger of losing.
Testimonials
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John Markoff | Pulitzer-prize winning NYTimes writer and author of several books
“I met Tom Gruber in 2008, long before the current wave of commercial artificial intelligence transformed Silicon Valley. At the time I was struck by the fact that he was both a researcher in the field of AI and someone with a close connection to the work of Doug Engelbart who had coined the term Intelligence Augmentation, or IA. Engelbart’s philosophy was based on extending rather than replacing the human with computer systems. Tom went on to help design Siri, an important example of what he describes as humanistic AI, an effort to deploy AI techniques in the context of shared human values. His perspective is even more vital today when AI technologies are being widely deployed by both corporations and governments.” -
Dave Ford | Founder and Executive Director, Ocean Plastics Leadership Network
“Tom’s dedication, passion, and mission to heal our ocean align deeply with everything we’re working towards at the Ocean Plastics Leadership Network. As an advisor and ambassador, Tom has helped us navigate an extremely challenging landscape between our activists and industry members. Tom’s calming presence has helped us build trust between arch enemies. He was in the open ocean for hours 500 miles off the coast of Bermuda in the Atlantic Gyre, not only taking powerful, heart-breaking pictures but also helping the 165 plastics executives we had out there with us feel comfortable in an extreme situation. With his camera and with people, his steady hand helped our participants relax in a scary experience for many (snorkeling in the open issue with 2 miles between there are the bottom. Tom views that collective action is necessary to solve the plastics crisis and that we’re only going to get there with cross-disciplinary leadership.” -
Jack Porter | Founder and CEO, Cognizer
“Tom is not only one of the early founders cognitive knowledge management, he is a thought leader who totally gets where this space is going. He has proven to be one of my top advisors as Cognizer helps invent the future with Genius. I am able to “pitch and catch” with Tom on nearly a weekly basis, and his value to me and my team has been tremendous.”