AI Creating a New Channel and Ecosystem | Apple SIri/Viv Creator Adam Cheyer

I mean, I think that it's definitely true that we've seen the sort of competitors or similar services to Siri spring up across the board. There's Cortana. And I understand that the work you're doing now is sort of adding an intelligent layer to things outside of phones and whatnot. But the best example of sort of adding that intelligent layer to another device that I'm aware of is probably the Amazon speaker. I don't remember what it's called right now.

Amazon Echo.

The Amazon Echo. And most of the— I don't own one, but most of the reviews I hear is that they use it for a few days and then it's just sort of like, my phone's always in my pocket. Why bother to ask the speaker these questions? And I'm curious how you see sort of adding this intelligent filter to other applications and what the work you're doing now that sort of continues from what you did with Siri before.

Yeah. Great question. So when mobile finally took off, With the invention of the iPhone, there was this term that was post-PC. Post-PC. And that didn't mean the PC, meaning desktop or even laptop computers, went away. But it was really about opening a new channel. Now there were these mobile phones that you could do— get information and services in places where the desktop computer were not relevant. So before, when the web came out, every business in the world needed a website. Why did they need anything more? But when the iPhone took off and the App Store was launched, now every business in the world needed a second channel, either a mobile app or at least a mobile website. And when— I remember when Google started saying the amount of web queries we're getting over these phone things are just way beyond our predictions, right? It surprised everyone. But I think today, you see people walking down streets like this. Man, that's— it's shifted, right? So, it's not that the first era went away, it's that we opened up a second era. So, now, what you're referring to is post-mobile.

What's that?

Right? It's something new. And so the— for me, it's not that mobile is going to go away or desktop is going to go away. It's that there will be a third channel that at some point every business in the world will need to plug into it because the usage is just high. And so that means, are there any environments, any moments when a phone and a desktop computer are not appropriate? I think there are. So, let me give you a few examples. You're driving hands-free in your car. So, there are more than 1 billion hours in the US alone spent in commute time. It's not a good idea to be driving down the road and the driverless— auto-driving cars are not quite ready yet— looking at a screen on your phone. So all you can do is listen to the radio or maybe talk on a phone. There's one case. There are messaging platforms. Facebook wants to directly message to a business. That's kind of a different kind of environment than an app or a website. There are Amazon Echos. So my wife has one. She's not really a technology adopter. She uses it all the time, especially in the kitchen. She goes, Alexa, set a timer for 6 minutes. Now, she could run over to a phone, It's just too hard. Why not just say that? And so, she says it, and from across the room, it starts recording a time. Or, how many cups in this? Et cetera. Or, pull up a— and so, when you're jogging, there's all the smartwatches that are happening. There's virtual reality coming. So, in my view, in all of these kind of this intelligence at the endpoints that I see happening— There is a common thread to them all. And to me, I'm biased perhaps, conversation, meaning being able to express some intent, have the system understand you, maybe come back and ask a question or follow up, and then know your preferences and do something for you, achieve that task, that is common to all these endpoints, to cars, to TVs you can talk to, to watches, to messaging platforms, to virtual reality headsets. And more. And yet, there's no app store for conversation. What I mean by app store is there's no place that every business who has a website and a mobile app can plug into an ecosystem to enable their content and transactional capabilities to be accessible in these post-mobile moments. And so that's really what we're trying to do with my new company. It's called Viv. Pretty stealthy, so I'm not going to go into much more detail than that. But the idea is that we will go to every developer in the world, every website mobile app developer, and say, you want to make money on the web by this— you want brand, you want advertising dollars, you want transactional revenue. You probably have a similar model on the App Store. You can plug into us and get the business incentives you want, will take you to new customers in new contexts, and allow you to, you know, access a new channel. And that channel will be available on every device in every context, we hope, if we're successful.

So, if you can't go into detail on this question, I understand. But it sounds in many ways like you're essentially talking about describing a new platform for communication that businesses can plug into. In much the same way that Siri created a new way to interact with the phone, and you were able to be the first to market and to become the dominant technology because it was integrated right into the phone. But when talking about a platform that's not leveraged on existing technological standards. It's not a website. It's not an app for the phone. How do you— how does one work to achieve the buy-in, the ability to sort of win over enough hearts and minds that you have that critical number so that it does become a viable platform, a viable new tool?

Yeah. So ultimately what we want to build is really a marketplace or an ecosystem, which is always the chicken and egg problem. You need customers to get the providers or the sellers, and you need sellers to have something of value to the customers. So without revealing too much detail, our approach is we're going to come out with a new— say, a new assistant. Let's call it Viv. And we think it'll be dramatically better than any of the assistants on the market today for a number of reasons. Okay. And then we are going to go to distribution partners. We don't want every individual user to have to download it. We will go to car companies and watch companies and phone companies and others and say, look at this, try it out, we think it's better, would you want to make this available to your customers? And we think some of them will. And that will bring millions of customers through these platforms to Viv. And then we can go and we'll open up the App Store or the developer tool platform and say to developers, we've got millions of customers over here. This is a cool technology. It's a new third channel. It's easy and you can make money. And then we think they will start to plug in. And as they plug in, this system will dramatically grow in capabilities. And it's not an— the way we're doing it is quite unique. And I won't go into much detail, but it's not just an app store where you have individual apps that are separate from each other. As you add new capabilities, this thing will grow in capability exponentially. You will be able to cross, you know, the boundaries between services will disappear. in a new way. And so this system will be getting smarter and more capable every day. It'll be like a snowball taking off. And if that happens, at some point, we think everyone will need to plug into this, we hope.

I mean, it sounds like an amazing new tool that we'll hopefully see soon, but it also almost starts to sound a little bit scary. Like, I realize that we're not at the point of, you know, Isaac Asimov's concerns of, like, computers becoming— robots becoming more intelligent and sort of creating robot wars and all of that stuff. That's sort of absurd. But the idea of your personal assistant getting more and more sophisticated, better conversation recognition, at some point, theoretically, We'll have virtual assistants that pass the Turing test, that you can't tell that they're actually robots based on the questions you ask them. Where's the limit lie? At some point, do customers start to feel that this is, like, discomfortable? What have your experience shown in terms of the changing personality of these sort of assistants?

There's been a lot of talk, especially from some really high-profile people, like Elon Musk and others who've raised the fears of kind of AI becoming conscious and maybe super intelligent, and what is this going to mean for humanity? I've been working in AI for decades, and I've led the largest AI project in US history. So there were 27 subcontractors, top universities, Stanford, MIT, Everyone, Berkeley. That set my expectation of when we will have super intelligent machines back probably by a few millennia. So, for me, you said one word, theoretically, and I agree. If machines achieve this level of intelligence, it's a real thing to be concerned about. But it's a theoretical concern, kind of like if we met aliens, it would be a real, you know, that's a real concern, right? Because maybe they're super evolved, and if they were to come here, they'd probably have technologies we don't understand, and what would that mean for humanity? But it's in that same realm. Like, from my perspective, it's so far out from what I can imagine. It's almost incomprehensible. Today, you know, we are making advances, but they're really practical advances. And in terms of a system that will start to think and be conscious and reason and do something more than it's programmed to do, I don't see that. I don't feel like anyone that I've seen in the entire field has any idea how to do that.

Thank you.

So that's just my view on the fears that have been kind of conjured up around AI recently. That said, I do think AI is becoming increasingly practical and will be used in more and more and more tools. I mean, Google Search is AI in a way. It's, you know, machine learning on every website in the world, and you can get to the page you need Pretty darn accurately. That's incredible. You could not do that with a human sitting there typing it all in like they did with Yahoo, the hierarchies of web pages before. So it's a real advance. And so from a practical point, I think things will become much more useful. Then it says, well, as we get connected in with privacy and it's controlling or intermediating more of our lives, Is that a concern? Sure. I think privacy and security and all of that matters, and we're becoming more and more reliant on technology in general, AI or not. And that's kind of a whole discussion. I don't see AI as particularly different than any other enabling technology. So definitely concerns to think about, but the concern of a system becoming super intelligent, For me, and from everyone I've talked to, and everyone I've talked to who are actually working on the problems, it seems, for my— I would guess probably millennia, maybe centuries, but not anytime soon. Thank you.