Digital Disruption

00;00;00;17 - 00;00;25;02

Geoff Nielson

Hey everyone! I'm super excited to be sitting down with the co-founder of Siri, Adam Schreier. Siri was the original AI agent and long before Apple bought it. Adam played a key role in creating one of the most important and widely used digital services of all time. What's cool about Adam is he's dedicated his career to building and designing a series of well-received AI tools, and has unique insight into what products will be winners and losers.

00;00;25;05 - 00;00;49;08

Geoff Nielson

I want to ask him where AI assistants go from here. If the current wave is overhyped or under hype, and how we can design the future we want. Let's find out. Adam, thanks so much for joining today. You know, you're the co-founder of Siri, which is, you know, in many ways feels like, you know, kind of a mother or a grandmother of what we've seen in terms of generative AI.

00;00;49;09 - 00;01;08;01

Geoff Nielson

Like, I can very easily draw a straight line between what Siri was doing and what's happening now in terms of your world now. You know, when you look over the tech horizon, you know what catches your interest, what excites you, and what's your impact? What's your impact assessment for? You know, all things AI in tech?

00;01;08;03 - 00;01;43;14

Adam Cheyer

Yeah, I think so. I've been in this industry. Next year will be 40 years in AI, professionally for me and I would say the first thing is this latest generation of AI exceeds my expectations in some dimensions. So it's it's beyond what I thought I would ever see in my lifetime. So a pretty strong statement. However, there are glaring missing parts to it that I don't think most of the industry realizes.

00;01;43;21 - 00;02;12;12

Adam Cheyer

Yeah, and no one is doing well. And so I'm both equally amazed and frustrated at the current crop of of systems. And as an example, a lot of people come up and say, oh, ChatGPT is 100 times better than Siri. I'm like, oh, really? I go with Siri. I can say, Hey Siri, tell my wife I'm going to be late.

00;02;12;14 - 00;02;53;25

Adam Cheyer

Can can ChatGPT do that? Oh no, no, it can't send a message to my wife. Oh, with Siri, I can say play my workout playlist or make me a reservation. Tomorrow night at, at 7 p.m. at a restaurant. Can can chat. No, it can't do that. So one of the glaring missing pieces is when I first started my first version of Siri 32 years ago, 1993, before I saw web browser, I said, someday everyone will have an assistant that you can say, I want to know this or I want to do that, and the assistant job will be to work with all the services and applications around the world to help you get

00;02;53;25 - 00;03;25;25

Adam Cheyer

a job done. Learning as you go. And it's amazing on the knowing side. ChatGPT is incredible, but it's the architecture and all the gen tech and, you know, orchestration type things we hear. Operator. From OpenAI, to me, it feels like what you get when you try to force fit doing use cases into a knowing architecture, and it just feels so wrong and broken and just the wrong direction.

00;03;25;25 - 00;03;30;26

Adam Cheyer

The approach is not right. So I'm both amazed and sometimes frustrated.

00;03;30;28 - 00;03;50;14

Geoff Nielson

But that's really interesting. And you know, I like how you frame that in terms of the the force fit. So it sounds like I mean, I'll ask you directly, is this something that you think is just going to be solved in the coming months, or is there just something fundamentally mismatched about how we're trying to solve this problem?

00;03;50;16 - 00;04;34;10

Adam Cheyer

So, I've, I've spoken about this a bit in the past. I think there are three major topics that are missing with the current crop of AI and lens, and all three of them are hard individually and in order to get it right. By my definition of right, you need to solve all three together. And so, because of the complexity of each and the complexity of doing it all together, I'm hopeful it can happen in the next ten years, but it's not in my appreciation going to happen in the next any time in the next few months or year.

00;04;34;11 - 00;05;02;21

Adam Cheyer

So what are the three things? The first is the user interface is all wrong in my opinion. So there's a reason why most websites, most apps do not have a chat based interface. Whereas today, AI most often comes in a form where you're having a textual back and forth conversation. Graphical interfaces are important. Take travel. You know, travel is emotional.

00;05;02;21 - 00;05;32;24

Adam Cheyer

It's a visual you want to work with maps and timelines like you need visual information. Having a text chat to do that type of task is and it's it's just not satisfying and it's a bad experience. So what is the right mix of language and graphical interface. That's that's problem one. And I don't think people have solved the problem two is this issue about knowing and doing.

00;05;32;27 - 00;06;02;02

Adam Cheyer

Of course everyone wants both. We just saw yesterday I saw a post open. I just bought a pizza. I'm like, yeah, Siri did that in 2008. You know, good. But if you think about what is a knowing architecture, it's based on usually cached index of information. The Pete and GPT stands for pre-trained. So it's been built out. Whereas doing requires APIs right.

00;06;02;02 - 00;06;28;01

Adam Cheyer

Live calls. So you can buy the ticket and book the the taxi or whatever. Right. You need authentication. There's a number of things a company, if you're going to use an API and not try to do this web scraping approach, everyone's trying. You need participation from the service provider. And and no one has really figured out how to do that.

00;06;28;01 - 00;07;00;23

Adam Cheyer

And what's the right combination of knowing and doing. You want to be able to say, oh, book me or reservation at the restaurant that that, you know, Heisman Trophy winner from Pittsburgh owns or whatever. Right. Knowing and doing users don't make a distinction to what's the right architecture that combines both. And the third is we need an ecosystem and an app store, since doing requires, API calls and participation.

00;07;01;01 - 00;07;33;10

Adam Cheyer

Service providers want things like brand. They want their brand to show up. They don't want to just be disintermediated. They want to own the user. They want to control the user interface. They could do that on the web. They could do that on mobile. What's the AI equivalent where an OpenTable or a Yelp or Uber can plug in and have the things they need to feel successful as a business and differentiated with a business and on the user side, users want different things.

00;07;33;11 - 00;07;58;20

Adam Cheyer

Maybe I like Lyft and Uber or vice versa. I have preference is I you know, I care about some tasks and domains but not others. So how do you have a marketplace or an ecosystem? And so and I think it's a big problem today with IP rights. And you know, and people are trying to use scrapers to go around working with the partners directly.

00;07;58;22 - 00;08;24;15

Adam Cheyer

It, it feels slow and broken and just the wrong way to do it. So for me, those are the three things that are missing the right interface, an architecture that cleanly supports knowing and doing, and an ecosystem that provides the right, a service provider, the ability to have knowing and doing and the right interface under their control, meeting the the needs both sides of the marketplace.

00;08;24;15 - 00;08;27;28

Adam Cheyer

So that's that's my view of what's missing.

00;08;28;01 - 00;08;51;19

Geoff Nielson

It's it's a really interesting list. And the reason I say that is because it, I hear these three and it's so obvious to me hearing each one, it's like, yes, that is something missing with the crop of generative AI tools. And yes, that is something Siri got right, you know, ten, 15 years ago. And so, so it's interesting to to kind of compare and contrast the two.

00;08;51;25 - 00;09;26;01

Adam Cheyer

The irony with Siri is we we got the mix of graphical interface and language. We got the access to APIs and apps for, for doing. We were not very good at knowing. So we had to like call out to WolframAlpha at the time. Now we have a lens. But the the Third Vision ecosystem, which was always, for me, the whole point of Siri got left on the cutting room floor after Steve Jobs died.

00;09;26;02 - 00;09;50;01

Adam Cheyer

So you know that Siri launched October 4th, 2011. Steve died the very next day. His admin wrote to me and said he was literally clinging to life to see the launch of Siri. And he passed the note, oh my gosh. And we had agreed before hand that just like the iPhone came out with 15 great apps to set the standard.

00;09;50;04 - 00;10;21;06

Adam Cheyer

The next year, the the App Store opened, and every developer in the world for every industry could now plug and play. Following that, the standard that Apple set. That was always the whole idea of Siri. We're going to start with the same 15 built in apps, you know, timers and weather and stock and maps, but then you need to open it up as an ecosystem so that it's as important as as the web and as mobile.

00;10;21;09 - 00;10;37;15

Adam Cheyer

And that unfortunately never happened. So that third vision, like we were trying to get all three all the way back and 2010, 2011, me going back 32 years. But that was never achieved.

00;10;37;17 - 00;11;02;04

Geoff Nielson

I didn't, I didn't know that story offhand about the timing and, and, you know, the missing piece there with the vision. You know, I'm curious. And I'm sure you have a, you know, very interesting perspective on this is, to me, like the App Store was one of the pillars of the success of the iPhone. Right? Like that pillar was one of Steve Jobs genius ideas that made this whole thing take off.

00;11;02;06 - 00;11;23;14

Geoff Nielson

And it kind of seems like nobody's really nailed that ecosystem idea since then. Like he nailed it and like, yeah, like Google did the same thing with Android, but I don't know what it feels. And I'm curious what you think. Adam. It's like there's been kind of a decline of that, and we haven't seen a really good ecosystem like that in the past handful of years.

00;11;23;16 - 00;11;30;03

Geoff Nielson

First of all, do you buy that premise? And second of all, you know, why do you think that is, and do we need to get back to it?

00;11;30;05 - 00;11;57;19

Adam Cheyer

I do think we need to get back to it. I think it's a huge missing piece. For me, there are paradigm shift moments and I sub. I came up with what I call the ten plus theory or conjecture. Everyone says things are going faster and faster. I say things are actually slowing down a little bit when let explain at a macro level, not at a micro.

00;11;57;19 - 00;12;30;28

Adam Cheyer

Of course, there's a lot of micro things. So let's start with how people interact with computers. 1984 The Mac. You had the mouse and windows go mainstream 8410 plus one years later, and there was an ecosystem for it. Here's how you build applications for with a graphical interface, right, that supports the mouse and windows and all about ten plus one years later, 95 Internet Explorer and Netscape.

00;12;31;00 - 00;12;56;00

Adam Cheyer

And now the web takes off. And again, there's an interface paradigm. There's an ecosystem. You just have to install this web server, blah, blah, blah. Ten plus two years later can see where I'm going with this. 2007 was the iPhone, right? And the following year they split the iPhone and the App Store into two. So 2008 was the iPhone.

00;12;56;00 - 00;13;25;14

Adam Cheyer

So I've been saying that for more than a decade that in ten plus three years later, my prediction was that there will be a new paradigm for interaction as important as the web and mobile, and it will be the conversational assistant. And if you take GPT three, which was June 2020, and 3.5, or ChatGPT, as we call it, which was November 30th, 2022, if you split the difference.

00;13;25;16 - 00;13;54;22

Adam Cheyer

2021 is a pretty good prediction. And but you need in order to be a paradigm scale system, you need the right interface, you need knowing and doing, and you need an ecosystem. All of these have at it. The web mobile wouldn't even computing wouldn't exist without having those three things. And so I just feel like the potential for what we're seeing today has not been fully realized.

00;13;54;23 - 00;14;17;29

Adam Cheyer

It exploded in some dimensions, but it has these gaping holes. And then my next prediction, ten plus four years later from 2021. So 2035 is my prediction for the next major paradigm shift for how we interact with computers. And it is. Any guesses?

00;14;18;02 - 00;14;21;21

Geoff Nielson

I don't know. Spatial superintelligence. Where are you going, Adam?

00;14;21;23 - 00;15;10;12

Adam Cheyer

Close. I think it's augmented reality. And I think by 2035, battery life, the headsets, whether it's contacts or glasses, the application ecosystem, all of the things will come together where we can literally, we live in our world, but we can augment all the pixels that we see through our visual prosthetics and I'll have augmented reality, the physics, etc. and for me, the same way that Siri was like the the harbinger that opened up the NI, the desire, the possibility to have a conversational AI, you know, some ten, 15 years later, things like the Apple Vision Pro, they were not meant for consumers.

00;15;10;13 - 00;15;37;24

Adam Cheyer

Now, Apple knew it wasn't. It wasn't meant for mass market. The battery doesn't even last long enough for to watch a movie. But it it introduced the possibility, the desire that I think by 2035, the next, you know, breakthrough interface paradigm will happen. But again, you need the same three things knowing and doing the right interface and an ecosystem that every developer, every industry can build for it.

00;15;37;26 - 00;16;02;22

Geoff Nielson

The, I like that prediction and the reason I like it is because it feels realistic based on the gaps that I'm seeing in augmented reality right now. And I've been, you know, just just very briefly, I've been a skeptic of augmented reality for a while on the metaverse. And I feel like every year we get sold some bill of goods of why it's, you know, that the technology is right here and everybody should be super excited.

00;16;02;24 - 00;16;19;24

Geoff Nielson

And I still haven't seen the killer app for it. You know, I still haven't seen the confluence of, of, you know, ideas and what can be unlocked that actually makes me say, okay, people are going to want to wear this and are going to want to engage here. So I'm, I'm curious from your perspective, like, what's what's missing?

00;16;19;24 - 00;16;28;03

Geoff Nielson

Like, what could be a year in ten plus four years or call it, you know, ten years from now that we don't have today. And people are getting wrong now.

00;16;28;03 - 00;16;51;29

Adam Cheyer

Well, I never think about a killer app. There are sometimes killer apps like a spreadsheet, you know, Lotus one, two, three might have been the killer app that brought everyone a PC on their desk in some form. But you know what's the killer app for graphic interface and mouse? What's the killer app for web? You know, maybe knowledge search like it changes things, but it's not just one.

00;16;52;02 - 00;17;25;08

Adam Cheyer

It's not one app. I always think about the killer OS. It's it's it's a framework, a paradigm for doing things that is better than the way we can do computing today. And if you think about the paradigms in this scale, the graphical interface we had that we were chained at our desk and we had to load it up with software from CD-ROMs and floppy disks, and we could compute using what we had.

00;17;25;11 - 00;17;54;15

Adam Cheyer

The web let us magically now compute using software around the world, but you are still chained at your desk. The mobile interface now freed you from the desk so you could walk down a street, bump into lampposts while you're staring at your phone. You could now compute in moments that you couldn't beforehand. Conversational AI lets you. Now there are still moments you can't do computing if you're driving in your car.

00;17;54;15 - 00;18;21;08

Adam Cheyer

10,000, ten. I forget the statistic. I think it's like 10,000,000,000 hours in the US commute time. Or at least used to be before pandemic. Right? You can't be looking at your screen or doing this, but you can be saying, hey, you know, what's this? You can learn things, you can do things. You can, you know, it gets you moments when you're washing dishes, a conversation personal assistant can help you compute.

00;18;21;10 - 00;18;52;06

Adam Cheyer

And so what's missing for are what's the killer app? It's like today we're bound with screens everywhere there, you know, and someone said, we've lived in a world for 10,000 years without screens, and we will live 10,000 more years in a world without screens. And why? It's because, you know, it is still somewhat inconvenient to have to pull out this phone, and it's not in the right place.

00;18;52;06 - 00;19;15;09

Adam Cheyer

And it's, you know, oh, this computer, I've got a desktop monitor this big. And if I go to a movie theater, it's that big. Screens are so important today, and someday we'll be able to have screens that what we use screens for will vanish. And we can now do it with AR. But you need to be able to interact.

00;19;15;09 - 00;19;23;29

Adam Cheyer

You need to be able to have interface paradigms. You need to be able to get all information, etc. and that needs to be solved.

00;19;24;02 - 00;19;42;28

Geoff Nielson

Right. And it seems like, you know, just getting back to it, it seems like right now that we're quite far away from having figured out the design principles to get that right and to get people kind of engaged in that. And maybe that's a compute issue. Like, like maybe it's raw horsepower. Maybe it's not asking the question properly.

00;19;43;01 - 00;20;06;17

Geoff Nielson

But I'm curious, Adam. I mean, you in terms of creating Siri, I'm sure learned an awful lot about principles of design, about principles of, you know, human psychology. What what were some of the big lessons you took away from that? And how do they inform the way, you know, you, you know, parse out whether technology now is going to take off or not?

00;20;06;19 - 00;20;33;09

Adam Cheyer

Well, well, as I mentioned, we haven't even figured out the design principles for AI, let alone augmented reality. I think in many ways we may be closer to the design aspects for are than we are with AI, and in some cases now there's a lot to figure out. Occlusion. There are real world physics issues. Pointing is a little bit tough.

00;20;33;09 - 00;20;59;09

Adam Cheyer

You can't type easily. So how do you get information? Maybe it's through speech, but you know, so that I tell a story that you know, how did I meet Steve Jobs? We had launched a free app in the App Store named Siri. We were a little startup, 20 people, 22 people. He called our office unannounced. Two weeks after launch, said, hey, what are you doing?

00;20;59;09 - 00;21;20;16

Adam Cheyer

And want to come over to my house tomorrow, right? Like Steve Jobs was calling us. How did you get this phone number? Because people don't know one of the meanings for serious secret and Swahili. And we have, like, no phone number on the website, no sign on our door. And yet Steve Jobs was calling us that first day we went to his house, I had a discussion.

00;21;20;16 - 00;21;51;07

Adam Cheyer

I said, people often think voice will replace the guy, replace the keyboard. That's not how it works at all. So here's my first design principle, both for AI and AR. If it's on the I'll say screen or visual field, the best way is to directly manipulate. It used to be through a mouse or the iPhone introduced multitouch and pinch and zoom.

00;21;51;09 - 00;22;12;22

Adam Cheyer

But despite designer's best, attempts to put everything you need to know and everything you need to do on that screen, however big the screen is, you can't do it all the way. So if it's on the screen, the best way is to interact with it. If it's off the screen, the best way is to ask for it.

00;22;12;25 - 00;22;44;16

Adam Cheyer

And the perfect interface is a beautiful combination of both that keeps the task in conversational context. Whether you're clicking or talking or scrolling. It needs to be all, you know, seamless. And that's it's multimodal in a way that people are multimodal all the time. So for me, that's one big design principle. When you look at devices. And when I sold Viv to Samsung, we launched our AI technology on half a billion devices.

00;22;44;19 - 00;23;05;11

Adam Cheyer

We had an open developer ecosystem. We had a good I think we solved the three problems that I wanted to some extent wasn't a commercial success for various marketing reasons, but, I think there are clues. And if if people want to know how does how I think those things should be solved, go look at our our work there.

00;23;05;14 - 00;23;42;29

Adam Cheyer

But we shipped, on phones, tablets, smartwatches, giant televisions, speakers, and each context you have to think about what are the capabilities for input and for output. Screens are super giant like if you're on a big TV, but input is really a challenge, a speaker. It has to be voice and voice. Obviously a smartwatch, you actually can do touch and do some things, but typing you can't do on a smartwatch, you know, if I'm sitting at a desk type, you know, typing is a great fast way to enter information and pointing.

00;23;43;01 - 00;24;11;00

Adam Cheyer

So I would combine those two principles is you really need to have a seamless model that can dynamically adapt to the input requirements of the underlying device, and if it's on the screen, the best way is to touch it. If it's off the screen, the best way is to ask for it. And you need a seamless transition where it where users don't have to think about which they're doing.

00;24;11;02 - 00;24;49;27

Geoff Nielson

So for it. For anyone who's watching this and is, you know, in the in the business of design or thinking about how to, you know, solve these challenges or, you know, create the next workflow or doer app that's going to help with this. What what's kind of your approach in terms of the balance between just, I guess, like abstractly figuring out what the journey is, that's, that's multi-modal, that that the user is trying to solve for versus just, iterative feedback and getting something in people's hands and playing with it from there.

00;24;49;27 - 00;25;00;08

Geoff Nielson

Because serious Siri is kind of a long story, right? Like, as you said, it started in the early 90s. What what was kind of your recipe there that you've learned and reused in your career?

00;25;00;10 - 00;25;31;23

Adam Cheyer

Yeah, there are different ways for entrepreneurship. When we took serious round to we talked to every VC. We had a working prototype for certain use cases, and Siri was very domain focused at the restaurants and movies and whatever. And some VC said, oh great, just put whatever you have up as an MVP and users will tell you what they want to do, and you'll iterate with them and they'll tell you, I said, that's great for many products.

00;25;31;23 - 00;25;58;21

Adam Cheyer

When I was the founding member and first developer at Change.org, Change.org was rapid iteration cycle. We tried so many product ideas until four years later it finally took off. Viral. So it was iteration, but with Siri, you only get one chance to make a first impression. Steve Jobs wouldn't have called our office on the early prototypes right?

00;25;58;24 - 00;26;19;05

Adam Cheyer

We wouldn't have changed the world in quite the same way. And so I wanted to take the time and work with some of the best designers and people to really think through these issues. You can't just throw it up and users aren't going to know what they want, or if it doesn't exist yet, they'll tell you the problems with whatever you give you.

00;26;19;05 - 00;26;50;24

Adam Cheyer

But they won't tell you the solutions. And so user testing is important. But I think just doing deep thought around what are the possible space, you know, how do you do it? I'm so proud of many of the design approaches. I think there are things that we solved in the original version of Siri that got lost. And I'll give you one example with when Siri came out on iPhone and I had arguments with Steve Jobs about this, we argued lots of things.

00;26;50;24 - 00;27;26;27

Adam Cheyer

We had different opinions. I love the process, by the way. We can talk more about this, about how we debated solutions. But he said, I only want a voice interface. No typing to Siri. The original Siri had three modes of input. There was touch, or sorry, typing, tapping or talking, and they were kind of equal. And I say that the original 2010 launched Siri had 95% task completion rate success.

00;27;26;29 - 00;28;01;14

Adam Cheyer

I don't think any voice assistant since then has that. And why? It's because until we get Lem technology, which can kind of say something about anything, even though it can't do very much, until then, every assistant, Alexa, etc. had domains knowledge and they would, you know, if the user asked a question that was in domain, make a reservation tomorrow at 7:00 and it was in scope, it would work pretty well.

00;28;01;16 - 00;28;27;07

Adam Cheyer

But if they ask something that was out of scope, they wouldn't. And so we, you know, it would fail. You know, you'd say how many hairs on the leg of a grasshopper and they'll say, looking for restaurants named grasshopper near you are right. But that's not a question Siri could handle, right. But a user doesn't know. And a spoken interface you can't discover it's in speech is an expert modality in a sense.

00;28;27;07 - 00;28;46;17

Adam Cheyer

It's not a beginner. You can't browse, you can't discover. And so we spent a lot of time looking at what's the beginner experience, what's the intermediate like. Maybe you know, it does restaurants but you don't know. Can I say find me a restaurant with a view of Golden Gate Bridge? That's like maybe it's in scope, maybe it's not.

00;28;46;17 - 00;29;10;28

Adam Cheyer

Not sure. Right. So there's beginner. Intermediate expert. Oh, I know it can do. Make a reservation at a French restaurant. Boom. I can do it faster with voice and a any other medium. We looked at the different use cases and we optimized for all three. And I think many voice assistants and conversational assistants are only saying, you know, say anything.

00;29;10;28 - 00;29;47;10

Adam Cheyer

They don't give any support for beginners. Intermediate notes and, and language is often an expert modality. If it can do it, great. But if it can't and there are many things it can't do. Still, users don't have a way to to discover that, and users hate to feel stupid if it says looking for restaurant name grasshoppers, you know name grasshoppers near me user will attribute the failure to Siri rightfully so, but they will feel bad that they'll have a you know, they they don't want to feel stupid.

00;29;47;10 - 00;30;10;16

Adam Cheyer

They want to feel smart and successful and empowered. And so then they stop using Siri, except for the 1 or 2 expert use cases they know set a timer and let everyone else too, so they don't expand confidently their scope. And as such it only gets limited. And so anyway, those are some retrospective thoughts about how you approach the problem.

00;30;10;16 - 00;30;20;15

Adam Cheyer

And you know, if you go back and find old Siri videos, you can afford the iPhone launch, you'll see our solutions to those. So was there.

00;30;20;17 - 00;30;37;16

Geoff Nielson

Was there more of a graphical user interface then for that? Because that was one of the shortcomings we talked about. And to me, you know, the most obvious place for the beginner to learn more and, and be able to, you know, finesse what they're asking is a graphical way. Is that what it was, or was there a different.

00;30;37;19 - 00;31;03;13

Adam Cheyer

So we had type top or talk. So let me say a few words on that. In the beginning would give you a list of the most popular suggestions by category. So you'd say restaurant. So you could just scroll. Oh, it has restaurants, it has movies, it has, you know, blah blah, blah. But what does it do about as soon as you clicked on restaurants, it would pivot into a, a menu.

00;31;03;15 - 00;31;31;15

Adam Cheyer

You could say movies starring, and then it would say, you know, let's say starring actor rated PG did did it like you would say, oh, these are the things I know about movies. And you could go, you could kind of browse and build a model of what it did. So for the beginner, you could you could browse. Menus are great in a sense for browsing then typing you could we had what we call semantic autocomplete.

00;31;31;17 - 00;31;54;27

Adam Cheyer

So you would type arrow, say you wanted to find a romantic comedy hero and you would see romantic comedy would now show up on the list, but you would also see rodeos and tea rooms. You're like rodeos. I didn't know Siri knew about rodeo, so it would expand your understanding of what was in scope. Even though you're looking for romance comedies, you file away for later.

00;31;54;27 - 00;32;21;05

Adam Cheyer

Had college that knows about rodeos or tea rooms or whatever. So you would go, oh, oh, here's the romantic comedies. And then you could say starring click T, Tom cruise. And it was like this autocomplete that both expanded your horizons of what was in there. And contracted it to what was doable. And, and so you could leap in a few new restaurants, but you didn't know if it was the Golden Gate view.

00;32;21;05 - 00;32;47;00

Adam Cheyer

You you would type restaurants and you would see a menu of the possibilities. So for me, it was yes, it was, a mix. If you didn't type anything or ask for anything, it gave you suggestions that you could browse if you knew what you wanted, it would help you get there, both expanding and contracting. And if you knew that it worked French restaurants tomorrow, you would just say it.

00;32;47;00 - 00;32;50;21

Adam Cheyer

Boom. Speech as an expert modality.

00;32;50;23 - 00;33;26;09

Geoff Nielson

I'm just reflecting on that, and I'm coming back in the notion that everything is still anchored for me to this current wave of, you know, AI tools and what they can do and what they can't do. And their modality is and they're getting better at modalities, as you know, but they're not perfect when when somebody gets it right in your mind, is this going to be basically the, you know, the meeting point of Siri and these conversational agents that know, like, is that where we're going?

00;33;26;15 - 00;33;40;03

Geoff Nielson

And in your mind, does that, does that look something like, you know, the movie her with Samantha. Or how like, we've, we've got these kind of sci fi examples of that. Is this where we're heading or in your mind, does this, does the road take us somewhere else?

00;33;40;06 - 00;34;03;19

Adam Cheyer

Yeah, I think it's pretty close. I think it'll be woven into the computing we use. We'll still use graphical interface. So it's not, you know, Samantha from her was all voice only. And as I said before, voice is great when you're driving in your car or when you're washing your dishes, but it's not great for a lot of applications.

00;34;03;19 - 00;34;26;14

Adam Cheyer

Plan your trip to Paris. Would you go to Paris? Just if Samantha said, oh, you should stay at this hotel, it's like, no, I want to see photos of the hotel that I'm going to stay in. Right? It's useful, but you need more. So I think it will exist on screens. You will use a mix of GIS and language in this seamless, perfect way, you know, natural way.

00;34;26;16 - 00;34;44;17

Adam Cheyer

Like you might browse through options and then ask an AI, hey, does this one, is this one good at that? Or how far is this knowledge Alaska knowledge question or whatever, you know, are there any dog parks nearby that would be hard to do on the screen? There's no good way to ask for it in the graphical interface.

00;34;44;17 - 00;35;13;18

Adam Cheyer

So ask for it with language. Right. So that's where I think the interface paradigm takes us. It's we're still living on screens until are replaced. The screens then I think this conversational AI, I hope just like the internet evolved, will evolve to have my three missing pieces. So if you if you draw a parallel, the internet was 95, but you remember what we had in 95.

00;35;13;21 - 00;35;45;13

Adam Cheyer

It was static web pages with horrible interfaces like blink. The blink tag was really popular. And it wasn't dynamic. You couldn't do anything so bad. UI static couldn't do anything. That sounds a lot like GPT today to me. Bad UI knowledge. Great. Can't do anything. No ecosystem really. But over time we got JavaScript and we got interactive.

00;35;45;20 - 00;36;12;29

Adam Cheyer

We had databases and middleware tiers, and you could now pull and APIs and real time and doing oh, okay, it's it's getting richer. The interface is getting richer. The, the, you know, access to live dynamic websites, you know, from real data pulled from an API or whatever commerce starts to be able to happen. Amazon takes off. So, you know, I do think and eventually we get these standards.

00;36;12;29 - 00;36;35;23

Adam Cheyer

And now every business in the world knows how to build a good user experience that is dynamic and pulls live data and can know present information and do things. It's kind of mature. So I see this in the the time up until 2035 will be evolving the maturity of AI, just like we did the internet.

00;36;35;25 - 00;36;53;11

Geoff Nielson

Right. And I am, as I think about that, and I think about these technologies, whether it becomes, it's AI now, you know, you kind of, you know, you introduce the idea that, like, killer app is not the right way. I think about some of this stuff which, which is totally fair and is interesting to me.

00;36;53;13 - 00;37;14;03

Geoff Nielson

The other way that I was thinking about Adam and, you know, to me, whether it's the web, whether it's Siri, whether it's this, you know, conversational, you know, AI that we've got here is just like the word that comes to mind is magic. And I know you're a guy who has, you know, magic in your background. And certainly a word I've heard you use before.

00;37;14;05 - 00;37;34;26

Geoff Nielson

To what degree is we're planning for this stuff. And as you said, have this like, wow, moment of a first impression. Like, what's at the intersection of human psychology and magic and technology? How should we be thinking about this and what implications does it have for design and, and, you know, future product roadmaps?

00;37;34;28 - 00;38;10;07

Adam Cheyer

Yeah, that's a great question. I have a few different possible answers. So one is one form of magic is presentation, right. Magic makes you feel makes you feel. And if you take Steve Jobs as an example. So when he would do his rivet product reveals it was never about stats and here's how much memory it has, etc. he literally did a magic show and he used magic principles in his demonstrations.

00;38;10;07 - 00;38;39;18

Adam Cheyer

So I'll give an example. He one started one of his keynotes and he he showed up a picture on the screen of a jeans pair of jeans with a pocket, and he goes, have you ever wondered what, he started out and he said, the iPod has always been about a thousand songs in your pocket. And then he showed you a pocket for jeans.

00;38;39;18 - 00;39;06;18

Adam Cheyer

Pockets have a little pocket at the top because. Do you have you ever wondered what that little pocket is for? And everyone in the audience? Well, no way. Right. That's a magic thing, right? That card. I haven't come anywhere near it across the table or the other side of the room. Your sign card can't. But look, there's a card over there.

00;39;06;20 - 00;39;34;16

Adam Cheyer

No way that's going to be my sign card, right? Same exact mechanism. And then he pulled out the iPod nano. This little thing that fit in your pocket. Right. So, one, there are lessons in magic about how to present your products and your tech systems in a way that makes people feel, that builds anticipation, that creates wonder.

00;39;34;18 - 00;40;09;21

Adam Cheyer

You know, when's the last time you've been really excited about a technology? Well, whatever it is, it someone is using magic principles to make you desire. The second thing I would say is, AI and magic are very similar because it's a moving target and and 96, I believe, you know, I was IBM's deep blue beating the world chess champion.

00;40;09;24 - 00;40;34;10

Adam Cheyer

I'm like, oh my gosh. Chess was an intellectual activity. Humans mastered highest form of intellect. And now a machine could do it. That was a high. But then we're like, It's just brute force. Search looked and looked ahead. Right. Siri even came out and people were like, oh my gosh, I can talk to a computer to know things.

00;40;34;13 - 00;40;52;28

Adam Cheyer

You know, if we had said 25 years ago, you're going to have a device in your pocket, who knows not only where you are, but who you are, and you can have a conversation with it and it will, on your behalf, do things and answer things would have been magic, right? It would have been like science fiction. No way.

00;40;53;00 - 00;41;22;07

Adam Cheyer

Siri, was that an apple? If you remember the six months after Siri launched, the stock price nearly doubled of Apple. It surpassed Exxon to become the most valuable company in the world. Market cap wise, just selling the iPhone for us, which literally was the iPhone for slightly better camera and Siri. So magic, it made you feel, but it's a moving target today.

00;41;22;07 - 00;41;44;24

Adam Cheyer

You're like, It's just Siri, I the timer, right? And now AI is not deep learning. Now that was last year's definition of it. Now it's large language model. So sometimes people say well I oh my gosh it's changing so fast. What will I be in ten years? I'm like, oh it'll be amazing. You know, all this large language model stuff.

00;41;44;24 - 00;42;13;00

Adam Cheyer

But we'll go. That's not I because it's a moving target. And it's the same with magic. I give that the definition of magic. What is magic? Magic is you know it when you feel it. So I might do a trick, but if you don't feel anything, it's not magic for you. There may be two people. For one person, it's the most incredible thing they've ever seen for the other, like, oh, I've seen that before, right?

00;42;13;03 - 00;42;39;21

Adam Cheyer

Magic is only happening for one person. It's the same with AI. So for me, there's there are lessons to be learned. I also say entrepreneurs and magicians are exactly the same. They imagine an impossible future. Desirable future. That's the hard part. What? What should exist? And then once you have the vision, you work backwards from there to solve the math and the science to make it come true.

00;42;39;23 - 00;42;58;16

Adam Cheyer

So whether whether it's David Copperfield flying over a stage or you've created Siri or the next great breakthrough, and I, you know, the you need the vision and then you solve the math and science and then you hopefully make people feel and care. If not, it's not magic.

00;42;58;19 - 00;43;21;18

Geoff Nielson

I really like that. I've never heard that before. I really like that comparison between kind of entrepreneurship and magicians. And, you know, it got me thinking, Adam, that an awful lot of entrepreneurship, especially in tech, but in everything, is trying to do these magic tricks and it's performative. It's trying to convince people I have magic, this is magic.

00;43;21;18 - 00;43;45;27

Geoff Nielson

And, frankly, a lot more of it seems to be like telling versus showing these days. And I'm curious from your perspective, there's we're all these days so bombarded with stories about, oh, this is going to be the next thing in tech, or that's going to be the next thing in tech. I'm curious from your perspective, what have you been hearing about recently, or what are some of the tech trends that you say?

00;43;45;27 - 00;43;55;11

Geoff Nielson

Like, you look at it, you say, that's not magic. That's not going to be the next big thing. I don't care how many times you tell me that's not it. That's B.S. for right now.

00;43;55;14 - 00;44;25;15

Adam Cheyer

Yeah. So so one thing that I think if I have one superpower, I think it's seeing where the world is going to go and then timing the market to get there. So I had been working on Siri since 1993. Versions of it. If I had started it sooner, I would have fell too early. I started later. Maybe Alexa gets it right.

00;44;25;17 - 00;44;58;02

Adam Cheyer

So I built the first voice assistant. Many came after I was founding member and first developer of Change.org, which has now more than half a billion members, was the first social network for social activism. Many came after I started sentient. I was a founder of sentient, which was the first large scale machine learning platform company. In 2009, we had more than 2 million CPUs and GPUs, just as deep learning was starting to come out for neural nets and for genetic algorithms.

00;44;58;05 - 00;45;36;13

Adam Cheyer

With Viv Labs, I sold to Samsung. It was the first open AI assistant ecosystem, and it wrote code on the fly in 50 milliseconds for every user request. It would dynamically write a program to solve complex tasks on the fly. And now we see I can code, you know, some almost ten years later. So timing, is is everything, I believe that we will not see magic in the current crop of AI.

00;45;36;16 - 00;46;05;16

Adam Cheyer

I think we've seen incredible magic Man there. You know, you see these these moments that are fantastic. But to some extent, what's going to blow you away now? It's tough. I think what I want AI to do is mature, as we talked about with the web, to get the knowing and doing and better interface. But and ecosystem and those are magic in the same way.

00;46;05;22 - 00;46;33;12

Adam Cheyer

The first time you saw ChatGPT. Right. Or the voice, the voice, voice, the voice modes. I actually think the next big magic place will be to the side. It'll be something, something new. I have some thoughts. About what those. You know, where the next big magic moment might happen, but I don't think it will be in AI.

00;46;33;12 - 00;46;58;03

Adam Cheyer

I think I will mature and progress and become this kind of boring, infrastructure for everything. It will hugely change our society. But we won't. Just like the internet house who goes to a library anymore, but no one's like, whoa, the internet? Oh my God, you know, it's just the internet. Oh, it's just it's just a mobile phone.

00;46;58;05 - 00;47;01;18

Adam Cheyer

It's just I. So. Yeah.

00;47;01;20 - 00;47;10;02

Geoff Nielson

What can you what what can you tell me or what are you willing to tell me about where you think the magic is going to happen next?

00;47;10;05 - 00;47;40;10

Adam Cheyer

I'll tell you two things. So one, I already gave you, which is my prediction for time R and R, I do think are for 2035. There's a lot to do to get there, but I think it will go mass market in 2035. And to do that you need a magic moment, right? You're not going to get mass adoption if you can't create desire and frenzy around it.

00;47;40;12 - 00;48;08;08

Adam Cheyer

There's another which is more subtle, but it's important. And I, like it or not, the world right now is being faced with lots of complex problems. We've got. We went through the pandemic, which slap everyone in the face, right? It it made us feel a little bit of pain when you couldn't fly on an airplane, etc..

00;48;08;10 - 00;48;42;04

Adam Cheyer

But there's hunger, there's poverty, there's war, there's our country is divided. There's water pollution, climate change there. There are big systemic issues in the world, and AI is not going to solve them for us. We are going to have to build new tools. But of course, I will be part of that. That allows us to collectively solve problems better, big and small.

00;48;42;04 - 00;49;10;01

Adam Cheyer

I think it's a huge need that's getting ever more present. And in terms of my trends and triggers kind of framework that I do, we need something new, a new breakthroughs and human collaboration that augments our intellect and our ability to solve big problems. I use a little piece of it, but it's not enough. AI is not going to solve our problems.

00;49;10;01 - 00;49;36;26

Adam Cheyer

We working together will solve our problems. So I it's not as sexy as R and I. I call it CI collective intelligence. And and I'm not. I didn't invent the word dao gangel Bart, who also invented the mouse. He was the one to coined the phrase collective IQ and the whole concept of augmenting human intellect comes from him.

00;49;36;28 - 00;50;00;04

Adam Cheyer

But it is time now. Like I think the world is going to need that. I think that's the big breakthrough. If entrepreneurs are listening to this go, go there because the world needs it or will need it soon, and the first company that stands up and shows a real breakthrough there, I think we'll have huge adoption.

00;50;00;07 - 00;50;21;06

Geoff Nielson

Interesting it where it sent me, Adam, is when I think about the story of Siri again, you talk about, you know, you talk about the next the company that's going to solve this Siri. And and I know a lot less about this than you do. You had a front row seat to it, and created it.

00;50;21;06 - 00;50;51;00

Geoff Nielson

But serious story, you know, as I was learning about it, you know. Sure. Like there's Apple and there's Steve Jobs. But, you know, I don't know if if most people know, like the Stanford research, was kind of a key chapter for Siri, DARPA and some of the initiatives there intersected with it. Like, it seems like there were some there are some pretty big there's kind of a who's who of, of like institutions that at some point crossed paths with, with Siri was, was that cross-pollination?

00;50;51;03 - 00;51;07;22

Geoff Nielson

You know, one of the keys in your mind that actually enabled Siri to be the success that it is? And, and does that have implications for, you know, the future that we build and collective intelligence being able to have institution like that, this kind of collective institutional approach?

00;51;07;24 - 00;51;39;13

Adam Cheyer

Yeah. I just want to kind of shout out a little bit the role that government funding in research matters. So we all take the internet as, oh, you know, as standard, it has brought huge prosperity to the world. Right. And we might ascribe to Tim Berners-Lee came up with a web browser, but all of the work on Arpanet and internet was government funded.

00;51;39;16 - 00;52;07;14

Adam Cheyer

Early on, it laid all of the foundations right. Licklider and and many of the the government people funding those projects were huge. If you go back to the 2000, mid 2000, 2005, there was a director of DARPA named Tony Tether, and he funded 1000 projects a year. But there were two that he cared about more than anyone and invested more in.

00;52;07;17 - 00;52;36;26

Adam Cheyer

And those two were the Kylo Powell project. Which was what was it? It was an intelligent assistant that was based on machine learning, but could also interact and communicate with its user. It would build models of understanding of the user's world and their work life. You know, the tasks and the projects and who works on what and the roles, and then perform support tasks on top of it.

00;52;36;29 - 00;53;07;22

Adam Cheyer

But it was the first, you know, a real early working AI assistant. And the other one was DARPA Grand Challenge. What was that? It was self-driving cars. So those were the two big projects that he was funding. Tony Tether was funding to universities and students and grad students doing research. Fast forward ten years. You know, 2015 Tesla comes out with its first attempt at self-driving module.

00;53;07;24 - 00;53;48;19

Adam Cheyer

Amazing over the air update. Crazy. Never thought I'd see that in my lifetime. Siri 2011 launches. And then there's Cortana and Alexa and Google Assistant and on and on. And it lays the foundation for the AI that we're living in today. So I, I do think that Siri, which was a nonprofit research institute, which funded, you know, received funding, some commercial, but largely from government research funding, that funding, even though it's just like sprinkling seeds, you can see a direct payout ten years later to our economy, to our to everything.

00;53;48;19 - 00;54;17;15

Adam Cheyer

Right. So it is it's, you know, I think it's important. And something important to consider in this day is we're wrestling with budgets and, you know, allocations. And researchers from around the world. And, you know, how do you bring them to universities? And, you know, that system has contributed hugely to our to our, you know, the world's prosperity and Creative Commons.

00;54;17;15 - 00;54;20;04

Adam Cheyer

Two I'm not saying they're not from us. Sure.

00;54;20;11 - 00;54;49;12

Geoff Nielson

Know that that's great. And it's you know, it's not always the sexiest topic, but it's so interesting and it's so powerful to, you know, remember what's been unlocked when we can have that, you know, kind of government support. And I've had a few conversations recently that have been reiterating that which is which is awesome. Adam, you know, just kind of closing out here, do you have any kind of parting words of wisdom for, you know, leaders who are building the digital products and services of the future?

00;54;49;19 - 00;54;56;28

Geoff Nielson

And, you know, the best way to do that or to approach that based on some of the lessons you've learned over time.

00;54;57;00 - 00;55;25;27

Adam Cheyer

Yeah. So I guess for leaders, right now, AI is a thing. It it is real and it is an important and the transformative as the web and mobile. So every business will get involved. Every employee that's, you know, their their roles will change. So lesson one is we will have to embrace it. We you know, just like the internet, you can't ignore it.

00;55;25;27 - 00;55;59;00

Adam Cheyer

Right. It's there. You have to have a website. You have you know, it's something that will have importance. It is still early in its maturity. AI is great at some things. I think language education is amazing. Summarization, translation, general knowledge is great, but it's also a couple of years out from really being viable for some tasks that you would just think would be easy, like take customer support.

00;55;59;03 - 00;56;23;05

Adam Cheyer

Well, if we have ChatGPT that can answer every question about anything in the world and every topic, well, obviously it should be able to answer every question for like just one company. No brainer. But if you look around, where is a great generative AI customer support system? It's not quite there yet. Even OpenAI doesn't have a gen support system.

00;56;23;05 - 00;56;54;14

Adam Cheyer

Why is right? So there are. So I want to balance the hype. It is important you have to be learning and embracing it. But you should also know it's still immature and not quite there for some applications. So you know, proceed with with some caution. And, and I say use it internally as much as you can with the right procedures and processes in place.

00;56;54;16 - 00;57;13;10

Adam Cheyer

External it's hard. Guardrails are still challenging regulations, but use for your employees with the right procedures. Find the applications that it works really well. And, you know, stay on top of things, but be aware it's not magic for every application.

00;57;13;12 - 00;57;21;22

Geoff Nielson

And I want to say a big thank you for joining today. Really appreciate the conversation. Love your insights. Was super interesting. And I really appreciate it.

00;57;21;25 - 00;57;23;13

Adam Cheyer

Thank you so much. Let's go to bigger.