The Age of Humanistic AI | Siri Co-Founder Tom Gruber, Probabilistic Programming Pioneer Ben Vigoda, and Fractal CEO Pranay Agrawal

In this episode of Not Just AI, Fractal CEO Pranay Agrawal sits down with two pioneers who helped shape modern AI: Siri co-founder and inventor Tom Gruber and probabilistic programming pioneer Ben Vigoda.

Tom shares the origin story of Siri at the dawn of the mobile era, how it worked before deep learning, and why breakthrough products come from betting on where technology is headed. Ben traces his journey from early neural network days to building probabilistic computing hardware and creating probabilistic programming to make AI systems more interpretable and data-efficient.

Together, they explore why architecture and inductive bias matter as much as scale, how probabilistic approaches compare with LLMs, and what “humanistic AI” really means in practice. The conversation also tackles transparency, universal access, democratization versus control, AI’s energy footprint, and the emerging social relationship humans are forming with conversational agents, especially in high-stakes areas like mental health.