November 11, 2024 • 10 mins
AI is going to change the world – or is it?
The world of artificial intelligence has been booming, with major corporations and small businesses alike integrating the software into their work.
Tom Gruber is one of the minds behind Siri, the iconic virtual personal assistant purchased by Apple in 2010.
He’s now an entrepreneur and co-founder of another company, an adaptive music company called LifeScore.
Gruber told Mike Hosking that compared to some other major technological advances, AI is likely to be on the more transformative end.
“It’s omni-purpose,” he said.
“You can do all kinds of things, pretty much anything involving language on the input and language on the output, with this new technology.”
“It cuts across all vertical industries.”
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
A bit of a deep dive in the meantime into
(00:01):
AI for you, is it going to change the world
or not? Does anyone actually know whether it's going to
change the world or not? Now? Tom Grub is a
computer scientist, psychologist co founder of Siri, which is quite
the claim Sury got sold, of course to Apple. These days,
he's an entrepreneur and co founder of an adaptive music
company called Life Score. He's in the country as part
of Sparks Accelerate, Summits and Tom Grub as we a's
(00:21):
Tom Nice to.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Meet, Good morning.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
The window when you come up with something brilliant is
how big before you know somebody else is going to
copy it?
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Well, the interesting thing about the brilliant idea of Siri
was it wasn't ours. That idea of a personal assistant
had been around since nineteen eighty seven. But what the
window was for us was taking the time in history
when a technology was ready, and that's what we did.
And then we jumped on it. And we had only
two years to build it before everyone could see it
(00:53):
in the world and copy it.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
So what was the skill building it or seeing the window?
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Both? Actually it took a team, a small team only
twenty four people, but we saw the exact time when
a set of technologies were ready, just barely good enough,
and we went full speed on building out a thing
and it worked, and nobody believed it could work, and
then we showed it could, and then everyone believed they could.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Did you build it to sell it?
Speaker 2 (01:19):
No? No, we built it to build up a real company.
We had a really good business in e commerce on
the phone, and we started working on this when the
iPhone one came out, so at the very beginning of
the modern mobile era, and we really thought that's what
we're going to do. But hey, when Steve Jobs gives
you a call and says, hey, you want to join
forces with us, it's hard to turn that down.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Exactly. Did it change your life?
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Absolutely? I mean my career ambition was to have impact,
to have a lot of people's lives changed, and it
became an exponential bend in the curve on impact when
we joined forces with that one.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Really interesting that you say that, and I sort of
knew you would because it rid a bounce you and
you seem to be looking to use tick for good?
Is that Fay.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Definitely on the side of humanity? Yeah, we're trying to
there's tech for optimization for say, corporate profits, and then
tech for making people eyes the better. And it's easier
to do to.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Look la which is the interface that fascinates me most. So,
a good guy like you wants to do well by tech.
But the world is dominated by people who love the
bottom line more. How do they coexist?
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Well, it's very possible, especially in AI, where there's a
limited talent pool, you can actually attract the very best
people by having a higher goal. For example, open ai
was originally founded as a nonprofit to give the benefits
of AI to the world, and that's what attracted the
very best AI scientists, which created the modern aichatbot.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
But I'm sure they said that when the into the
net as well, didn't they? And yet look what's happened
to the net, the nest, the net, the Internet, Oh,
the Internet.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Well, actually that's very true. That's thirty years ago now,
and hey, it did do some good things in the world, Cannet,
it did change our collective mind. Unfortunately, you didn't. You
didn't anticipate social media and what that would do to
journalism and we don't would do to our social consciousness.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
Exactly. I'm not a techie like you, but but here's
my view of AI. AI will ultimately prove to be
very broadly speaking, about the same as most other really
big advances in tech. In other words, it won't be
as transformative as you think, but it won't be as
non transformative. It'll be somewhere in the middle. Is that
a reasonable guess at this point in time.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
I would put my ships on the more transformative end
of that. It's it's different than most technologies, and that
it is omnipurpose. You can do all kinds of things,
pretty much anything involving language on the input and language
on the output with this new technology and that that introduces.
But it cuts across all vertical industries. But anyone, anybody
(03:49):
who has knowledge workers in their business, which is everybody, yeah,
is going to be impacted.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
But for good or bad? And how extreme do you think?
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Well, there's two kinds of I mean, the bad that
really worries me a lot is the sort of unleashing
deep fakes that dissolves people ability to know it's true
and false, or you know, dangerous weaponized bot technologies that
could break into our security and everything. Those things are
tough and their system problems, but the other bad that
maybe we're looking at in Zealand. First, you know, everyone's
(04:19):
worried about you're done and seeing job loss and so on.
You know, the business cycle itself is causing that, but
people are worried that AI will too, and that's the
keys with the humanistic AI approach says you can invest
your efforts and attention and money in areas where the
AI is amplifying and changing existing human labor, rather than it.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Right explain to me in a way that I can
understand it might and so you go back to something
like Siri. These things are only as good as what
they tappen to. So in other words, when I say, Siri,
find me a recipe for tomato soup that trolls the net,
if it's not on the net, it doesn't give you
a decent answer. Does AI fundamentally and profoundly change that
(05:01):
or not?
Speaker 2 (05:03):
That kind of thing is essentially going to be the same.
It's a slightly better interface to information retrieval then say
just blue links and Google, but it is there's much
more to it than that, because you can also ask
the things like help me design an interesting new radio
show using you know, I don't know, dancing rabbits or something,
(05:24):
so you can help you can use you can use
it as an assistant to help you ID eight things
that are just not out there in the world. You
can say, play the role of a critic, play the
role of an employer, play the role of a whoever,
and it will take that role and you can then practice.
You can use it as sort of an omnipurpose human assistant.
All crimes are things for you, but believe that it
(05:45):
tells you it is true. That's all right?
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Is that retrieving to do that? Is that retrieving stuff
that's already there and therefore must source that? Or is
it a a point Will it be at a point
where literally it may be able to do something we
haven't even conceived or thought of yet.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Oh, oh, it doesn't. It doesn't retrieve anything to do.
Sounds like that it's already baked into its model. Its
model is essentially a very large compression of everything it's read,
and it's read a million lifetimes of content, and so
it's basically just all just smash that down into its model,
and then it can use that. There's enough patterns of
human thought that are in that model already. It can
(06:21):
use that to do new novel things with you. But
you have to tell it where to go. You can't
just say, hey, give me a solution to the world.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
So at what point does it take over the world,
Because if it has to be told what to do,
it needs to at some point think for itself. When
does that happen?
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Well, that will probably if that happen, it will probably
happen because a bad actor tells you that. And that's
what we're really worried about.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Here's a taxt, Mike II will be as transformative as electricity.
Is that fair or not?
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Do you think I actually believe it's true. I think
some PJ said that the head of Google is sort
of the company with the biggest investment in AI. I
think he's right. It is omnipurpose like a electricity. Electricy
has changed all kinds of businesses and lifestyle lifestyles. Thanks,
and we'll do that too. It hasn't happened this year.
It's going to be a little bit of transition exactly.
(07:09):
That's the main reason, is it.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
How exciting is it to be in this day and
age doing what people like you do versus being edison
and discovering stuff that we now take for granted.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
It's amazing to be alive right now to see it happening,
and we're you know, we're all going to see it happen.
I saw. I was already a professional when the web happened,
and seeing that happened was really exciting. It's been thirty
years now seeing this happened. Now it's going to eclipse
the Web in terms of the impact. And I think
we're going to see and all of us in our
lifetime thing called artificial general intelligence, which is a general
purpose AI that you can just kind of do whatever
(07:41):
you want it to. That's going to change everything. And
the funny thing is we saw that we saw from
pre cell phone days all the way to that in
one lifetime.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Is it going to dumb us down? If something or
something or somebody can do everything for us, what do
we do?
Speaker 2 (07:56):
No, absolutely won't run this down. If it's going to
challenge us to rise in education because sort of mediocre
writing and reading and mediocre knowledge work is not going
to be appreciated anymore. People are going to step up
and use these tools to be better than they are today.
And those who can learn to do that, are going
to be the ones who get to hide.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
Meaning jobs life score. It's adept of music, dynamically composed
and produces as it plays, which allows it to adapt
to content. What's the purpose of that? Why would you
want to do that?
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Well, let's say on your morning commute, you're listening to
the radio and then you want to turn for a
little bit of music to chill out. Well, it can
generate a piece of music that is a journey. Is
that company's your journey? Like a film score for your journey?
Or let's say're working out in a gym and you
want to have something just not a playlist, but actually
adapts while you're working out how it's going. That's you
(08:48):
can still have human machine human music, but it's remixed
on the fly.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
Is that being told what to do or is it
doing it for you?
Speaker 2 (08:58):
It's basically taking eg that was composed by humans and
recomposing it to in face of the signal. So like
you're a stoplight, it's sort of playing a nice chill
like holding beat, and then as you go up and
accelerate to go to the highway, it ramps it up
and goes more exciting it's all music that's already been
composed in a little bit, but then it's making it
(09:18):
adapt to your life situation at that moment.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
Is it workable? Is it real? Is it happening right now?
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Yeah? It does. It does work, and we have we've
had working for a couple of years. Now it does
actually work. It's really fun. In fact, we've also found
that we can just do it even without the adapt team.
We could just tell it. Hey, here's a guy who
had an album that's of great music for relaxing. He said,
give me an eight hour sleep album. I can't afford
to write this. Myself and the machine really have an
eight hour album. But now his fans can go to
(09:46):
sleep with Wow.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
How's the money side of this? It is raising money.
It strikes me that if you've got AI in your CV,
there's there's money to be head out there to, you know,
trying new ideas and do new research. Is that true?
Speaker 2 (10:00):
There is, Although that sort of an initial hype excitement
is sort of over now. I think I think now
we're in the stage where we're looking people are looking
to spend money on. How do you take existing AI
ideas and apply thement to a specific industry where you
know for sure that industry has a problem to solve.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Fantastic. What do you enjoy your staying in the country, Tom,
I've appreciated your time very much and good to meet
and talk with you. Tom Gruber. Once upon a time,
the inventor of sery bit has gone, as you've just heard,
onto other big, bright and wonderful things.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Gee.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
She's an interesting world.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Isn't it.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
For more from the Mic Asking Breakfast, listen live to
news talks it'd be from six am weekdays, or follow
the podcast on iHeartRadio.
A bit of a deep dive in the meantime into
(00:01):
AI for you, is it going to change the world
or not? Does anyone actually know whether it's going to
change the world or not? Now? Tom Grub is a
computer scientist, psychologist co founder of Siri, which is quite
the claim Sury got sold, of course to Apple. These days,
he's an entrepreneur and co founder of an adaptive music
company called Life Score. He's in the country as part
of Sparks Accelerate, Summits and Tom Grub as we a's
(00:21):
Tom Nice to.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Meet, Good morning.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
The window when you come up with something brilliant is
how big before you know somebody else is going to
copy it?
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Well, the interesting thing about the brilliant idea of Siri
was it wasn't ours. That idea of a personal assistant
had been around since nineteen eighty seven. But what the
window was for us was taking the time in history
when a technology was ready, and that's what we did.
And then we jumped on it. And we had only
two years to build it before everyone could see it
(00:53):
in the world and copy it.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
So what was the skill building it or seeing the window?
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Both? Actually it took a team, a small team only
twenty four people, but we saw the exact time when
a set of technologies were ready, just barely good enough,
and we went full speed on building out a thing
and it worked, and nobody believed it could work, and
then we showed it could, and then everyone believed they could.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Did you build it to sell it?
Speaker 2 (01:19):
No? No, we built it to build up a real company.
We had a really good business in e commerce on
the phone, and we started working on this when the
iPhone one came out, so at the very beginning of
the modern mobile era, and we really thought that's what
we're going to do. But hey, when Steve Jobs gives
you a call and says, hey, you want to join
forces with us, it's hard to turn that down.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Exactly. Did it change your life?
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Absolutely? I mean my career ambition was to have impact,
to have a lot of people's lives changed, and it
became an exponential bend in the curve on impact when
we joined forces with that one.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Really interesting that you say that, and I sort of
knew you would because it rid a bounce you and
you seem to be looking to use tick for good?
Is that Fay.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Definitely on the side of humanity? Yeah, we're trying to
there's tech for optimization for say, corporate profits, and then
tech for making people eyes the better. And it's easier
to do to.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Look la which is the interface that fascinates me most. So,
a good guy like you wants to do well by tech.
But the world is dominated by people who love the
bottom line more. How do they coexist?
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Well, it's very possible, especially in AI, where there's a
limited talent pool, you can actually attract the very best
people by having a higher goal. For example, open ai
was originally founded as a nonprofit to give the benefits
of AI to the world, and that's what attracted the
very best AI scientists, which created the modern aichatbot.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
But I'm sure they said that when the into the
net as well, didn't they? And yet look what's happened
to the net, the nest, the net, the Internet, Oh,
the Internet.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Well, actually that's very true. That's thirty years ago now,
and hey, it did do some good things in the world, Cannet,
it did change our collective mind. Unfortunately, you didn't. You
didn't anticipate social media and what that would do to
journalism and we don't would do to our social consciousness.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
Exactly. I'm not a techie like you, but but here's
my view of AI. AI will ultimately prove to be
very broadly speaking, about the same as most other really
big advances in tech. In other words, it won't be
as transformative as you think, but it won't be as
non transformative. It'll be somewhere in the middle. Is that
a reasonable guess at this point in time.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
I would put my ships on the more transformative end
of that. It's it's different than most technologies, and that
it is omnipurpose. You can do all kinds of things,
pretty much anything involving language on the input and language
on the output with this new technology and that that introduces.
But it cuts across all vertical industries. But anyone, anybody
(03:49):
who has knowledge workers in their business, which is everybody, yeah,
is going to be impacted.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
But for good or bad? And how extreme do you think?
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Well, there's two kinds of I mean, the bad that
really worries me a lot is the sort of unleashing
deep fakes that dissolves people ability to know it's true
and false, or you know, dangerous weaponized bot technologies that
could break into our security and everything. Those things are
tough and their system problems, but the other bad that
maybe we're looking at in Zealand. First, you know, everyone's
(04:19):
worried about you're done and seeing job loss and so on.
You know, the business cycle itself is causing that, but
people are worried that AI will too, and that's the
keys with the humanistic AI approach says you can invest
your efforts and attention and money in areas where the
AI is amplifying and changing existing human labor, rather than it.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Right explain to me in a way that I can
understand it might and so you go back to something
like Siri. These things are only as good as what
they tappen to. So in other words, when I say, Siri,
find me a recipe for tomato soup that trolls the net,
if it's not on the net, it doesn't give you
a decent answer. Does AI fundamentally and profoundly change that
(05:01):
or not?
Speaker 2 (05:03):
That kind of thing is essentially going to be the same.
It's a slightly better interface to information retrieval then say
just blue links and Google, but it is there's much
more to it than that, because you can also ask
the things like help me design an interesting new radio
show using you know, I don't know, dancing rabbits or something,
(05:24):
so you can help you can use you can use
it as an assistant to help you ID eight things
that are just not out there in the world. You
can say, play the role of a critic, play the
role of an employer, play the role of a whoever,
and it will take that role and you can then practice.
You can use it as sort of an omnipurpose human assistant.
All crimes are things for you, but believe that it
(05:45):
tells you it is true. That's all right?
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Is that retrieving to do that? Is that retrieving stuff
that's already there and therefore must source that? Or is
it a a point Will it be at a point
where literally it may be able to do something we
haven't even conceived or thought of yet.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Oh, oh, it doesn't. It doesn't retrieve anything to do.
Sounds like that it's already baked into its model. Its
model is essentially a very large compression of everything it's read,
and it's read a million lifetimes of content, and so
it's basically just all just smash that down into its model,
and then it can use that. There's enough patterns of
human thought that are in that model already. It can
(06:21):
use that to do new novel things with you. But
you have to tell it where to go. You can't
just say, hey, give me a solution to the world.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
So at what point does it take over the world,
Because if it has to be told what to do,
it needs to at some point think for itself. When
does that happen?
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Well, that will probably if that happen, it will probably
happen because a bad actor tells you that. And that's
what we're really worried about.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Here's a taxt, Mike II will be as transformative as electricity.
Is that fair or not?
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Do you think I actually believe it's true. I think
some PJ said that the head of Google is sort
of the company with the biggest investment in AI. I
think he's right. It is omnipurpose like a electricity. Electricy
has changed all kinds of businesses and lifestyle lifestyles. Thanks,
and we'll do that too. It hasn't happened this year.
It's going to be a little bit of transition exactly.
(07:09):
That's the main reason, is it.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
How exciting is it to be in this day and
age doing what people like you do versus being edison
and discovering stuff that we now take for granted.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
It's amazing to be alive right now to see it happening,
and we're you know, we're all going to see it happen.
I saw. I was already a professional when the web happened,
and seeing that happened was really exciting. It's been thirty
years now seeing this happened. Now it's going to eclipse
the Web in terms of the impact. And I think
we're going to see and all of us in our
lifetime thing called artificial general intelligence, which is a general
purpose AI that you can just kind of do whatever
(07:41):
you want it to. That's going to change everything. And
the funny thing is we saw that we saw from
pre cell phone days all the way to that in
one lifetime.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Is it going to dumb us down? If something or
something or somebody can do everything for us, what do
we do?
Speaker 2 (07:56):
No, absolutely won't run this down. If it's going to
challenge us to rise in education because sort of mediocre
writing and reading and mediocre knowledge work is not going
to be appreciated anymore. People are going to step up
and use these tools to be better than they are today.
And those who can learn to do that, are going
to be the ones who get to hide.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
Meaning jobs life score. It's adept of music, dynamically composed
and produces as it plays, which allows it to adapt
to content. What's the purpose of that? Why would you
want to do that?
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Well, let's say on your morning commute, you're listening to
the radio and then you want to turn for a
little bit of music to chill out. Well, it can
generate a piece of music that is a journey. Is
that company's your journey? Like a film score for your journey?
Or let's say're working out in a gym and you
want to have something just not a playlist, but actually
adapts while you're working out how it's going. That's you
(08:48):
can still have human machine human music, but it's remixed
on the fly.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
Is that being told what to do or is it
doing it for you?
Speaker 2 (08:58):
It's basically taking eg that was composed by humans and
recomposing it to in face of the signal. So like
you're a stoplight, it's sort of playing a nice chill
like holding beat, and then as you go up and
accelerate to go to the highway, it ramps it up
and goes more exciting it's all music that's already been
composed in a little bit, but then it's making it
(09:18):
adapt to your life situation at that moment.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
Is it workable? Is it real? Is it happening right now?
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Yeah? It does. It does work, and we have we've
had working for a couple of years. Now it does
actually work. It's really fun. In fact, we've also found
that we can just do it even without the adapt team.
We could just tell it. Hey, here's a guy who
had an album that's of great music for relaxing. He said,
give me an eight hour sleep album. I can't afford
to write this. Myself and the machine really have an
eight hour album. But now his fans can go to
(09:46):
sleep with Wow.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
How's the money side of this? It is raising money.
It strikes me that if you've got AI in your CV,
there's there's money to be head out there to, you know,
trying new ideas and do new research. Is that true?
Speaker 2 (10:00):
There is, Although that sort of an initial hype excitement
is sort of over now. I think I think now
we're in the stage where we're looking people are looking
to spend money on. How do you take existing AI
ideas and apply thement to a specific industry where you
know for sure that industry has a problem to solve.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Fantastic. What do you enjoy your staying in the country, Tom,
I've appreciated your time very much and good to meet
and talk with you. Tom Gruber. Once upon a time,
the inventor of sery bit has gone, as you've just heard,
onto other big, bright and wonderful things.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Gee.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
She's an interesting world.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Isn't it.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
For more from the Mic Asking Breakfast, listen live to
news talks it'd be from six am weekdays, or follow
the podcast on iHeartRadio.
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