Adam Cheyer

Adam Cheyer is one of the most consequential builders in the history of artificial intelligence, and one of the few who can explain where it's going because he keeps inventing the next part of it. Born around 1966 and raised in Sharon, Massachusetts, Cheyer earned a B.S. in computer science from Brandeis University (1988) and a master's in computer science and AI from UCLA (1993). He spent more than a decade at SRI International, where he was chief architect of CALO, the largest AI research project ever funded by the U.S. government, the program that became the seedbed for Siri. In the late 2000s he co-founded Siri and invented the assistant that bears its name. Apple acquired Siri in 2011, and Cheyer became a director of engineering in the iPhone group; Siri now ships on more than 500 million devices worldwide. He left in 2012 to found Viv Labs, an even more powerful conversational-AI platform, which Samsung acquired in 2016 and built into Bixby. Cheyer's fingerprints are on far more than voice assistants. He was a founding-team member of Change.org (now the world's largest petition platform), co-founded the machine-learning company Sentient Technologies (acquired by Cognizant), and co-founded GamePlanner.AI, which Airbnb acquired in late 2023 for a reported ~$200 million, its first acquisition as a public company. Since May 2024 he has served as VP of AI Experience at Airbnb, helping build the company's AI-powered future. In all, he has co-founded five startups, authored 60+ publications, and holds 50 patents. He is also, genuinely, an award-winning magician, a member of the Academy of Magical Arts who appeared on Penn & Teller: Fool Us, and he sees no contradiction in that. "Entrepreneurs and magicians are exactly the same," he says. "They imagine a desirable, impossible future that doesn't exist, and then they work backward from that vision to figure out the math and science to make it come true." In 2024 Brandeis honored him with its Alumni Achievement Award.