PORTRAIT. From Pibrac to Silicon Valley, the visionary journey of Luc Julia, father of Siri and detractor of the myth of super-intelligence

During the 1970s, in the small town of Pibrac, near Toulouse, a kid indulged in his first embezzlement of objects. Not to impress the gallery, but to respond to the primary drive of “how”. This little boy was Luc Julia, who, today at 59, became an engineer and entrepreneur. From childhood “I learned coding and programming,” he recalls. And he adds that “I must have been nine when I started”. He was not trying to dream of the machine, he was already trying to put it in his place. He says that, his motivation at the time, “it was to do things for what I called ‘real people'”. DIY alarms, homemade gadgets, a thousand small systems which, under modest outside, express a strong idea: technology only makes sense if it is useful, simple, transparent.

This quest for simplicity becomes a fruitful obsession with him. Very early on, he understands that a machine will never be really adopted if it does not speak our language. “As simple as possible is to use the signals that we use every day, gestures, speech … so that these technologies are accessible to the greatest number,” he explains. From this childish intuition will be born, much later, Siri. But before that, he will have to cross an ocean.

From French disappointment to Californian light

In the early 90s, a brilliant student at INSA Toulouse, Luc Julia first envisaged a career as a researcher at the CNRS. But the illusions fall quickly. The young engineer discovers a more compartmentalized world than he imagined. “I did not find the atmosphere that I thought I would find it. I realized that it was very individualistic,” he admits. So he takes off. Direction Boston, for a doctorate at MIT, then Stanford. But it was in California, under a softer sky, that he chooses to put his suitcases. “I went to California because it was too cold in Boston. I finished my thesis and I stayed there since, so it’s been 32 years now.”

His career in Silicon Valley marries the curves of technological innovation: first researcher, then entrepreneur, finally actor of large groups like HP, Apple or Samsung. In 2001, he co-brought Orb, a start-up that will broadcast television television on phone. A visionary feat. “We were the first in 2001-2002 to play live TV on phones. We were about 8-9 years old in advance.” This taste for advance, from step aside, will not leave it anymore.

Siri: the digital locust born before Apple

The general public discovers Siri in 2011, under the Apple label. But the project is much older. “We created Siri with Adam Cheyer, a friend, when we were in Stanford in 1997. We filed the first patents,” recalls Luc Julia. What was just a laboratory dream becomes a planetary product. The initial idea? : “We said to ourselves, it would be great to have a small locust on your shoulder. And this little locust, I could speak to him and tell him anything. And he was going to find me this on the Internet,” recalls the engineer. Where Google explores keywords, Julia is already betting on natural language.

But it is not one of those who sacralize the machine. On the contrary, he endeavors to dismantle the myths that surround him. In his book L’Alnetive not creative, he denounces irrational fears, Hollywood fantasies. “I am trying to deconstruct a myth that is the myth of being afraid,” he says. In his eyes, there is not a mysterious and autonomous super-intelligence, but a multitude of specialized, efficient, certainly, but limited tools. “We have returned to a fantasy of what artificial intelligences can do. I say that it is science fiction” he concluded categorical.

Rather than artificial intelligence, Luc Julia prefers to talk about increased intelligence. An alliance between machine and creativity specific to humans.

Today at the head of the Renault group’s scientific strategy, he refuses the prophet’s costume. He prefers that of a smuggler: craftsman of the link between the human and the machine, a discreet builder of a future where innovation is neither a panacea nor a threat, but a demanding companion of the human condition. Listening, again and again, “real people”.