• rebekkamikkoa 3 hours ago |
    I really like how he approaces AI. Not the tone other leaders are talking, but much more human and much more collaborative. How young people actually can help with the AI shaping. For example Eric Schmidt was really terrible at his speach in front of University of Arizona.
    • ramon156 an hour ago |
      Do tell me how young people can help with AI shaping, as this just sounds like "how cows can help shape the meat industry"
      • sweetheart an hour ago |
        They can learn the skills to advance research and fill the roles that help determine what sorts of guard rails there should/could be to ensure it’s used in as helpful a manner as possible.
        • muddi900 39 minutes ago |
          Do you think in the world of the Military Industrial Complex and the zero-sum game that is Great Power geopolitics, we will have any guardrails?
          • sweetheart 37 minutes ago |
            I think it’s possible.
          • darkwater 28 minutes ago |
            Trying to be optimistic, at least we didn't experience nuclear destruction at planetary scale...
        • mherkender 32 minutes ago |
          If you are naive enough to believe that, the moment you create problems for your bosses, you can be fired and replaced by some other naive person.
        • globalnode 22 minutes ago |
          Any why would I want to work as a prompt engineer? or with AI tech at all? when I trained as a software developer using my brain to solve problems with data structures and algorithms, not prompts. I outright refuse to do such a thing.
          • sweetheart 5 minutes ago |
            Okay!
      • block_dagger an hour ago |
        Ah, so the students were saying “moo,” not “boo.”
      • jappgar 39 minutes ago |
        They can start by voting for politicians who will rein in big tech
        • aduwah 23 minutes ago |
          There is no politician who stands against big tech and by extension big money
          • coffeefirst 16 minutes ago |
            We are about to test that theory.
          • master-lincoln 10 minutes ago |
            not even Bernie Sanders?
      • embedding-shape 38 minutes ago |
        To be fair, if you're a cow, you don't have much say in it, the world continues to revolve, and not around you, but you still need to find your place, or at least find peace with not finding your place.

        Every teenager goes through it, some still try to find their place until the day they day, but we all grow up in vastly different contexts and environments compared to what we experience as adults, and stuff keeps happening around us that we don't like, maybe don't even want to participate in, but because of the lack of alternatives, you don't really have a choice.

      • limflick 38 minutes ago |
        I guess an optimistic way to look at this would be to treat this as just another layer of abstraction, meaning people could focus on larger scale problems moving forward, similar to how the evolution of programming languages influenced development time, quality and the quantity of software being put out. The question is at what price does all of this abstraction come at, assuming AI continues to evolve at its current rate.
        • master-lincoln 17 minutes ago |
          This can not be seen as layer of abstraction as it's non deterministic and not trustworthy. So we still need to inspect and understand that abstraction layer output if we want to have a reliable product
          • bayindirh 13 minutes ago |
            Adding non deterministic layers on top of a painfully deterministic layer to make more betterer deterministic things is an oxymoron.

            ...and many people choose to ignore that fact.

      • SecretDreams 28 minutes ago |
        Now, more than ever, I think young people are cows for the economic meat grinder. It takes me to one of my favourite quotes:

        "We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children."

        I think we've forgotten this. We are not paying it forward any more as a society.

        • Jtarii 10 minutes ago |
          The world is a significantly better place than it was when my parents were my age.
    • limflick an hour ago |
      I wonder how Steve Jobs would've reacted to this GenAI boom. He constantly talked about the intersection of Humanities and tech, as well as fostering creativity by pushing people to their limits (for the better or worse), so I don't think he'd be one of those CEOs that's first in line to get rid of human workers as much as possible. Or maybe he would be and I'm just giving him too much credit.

      On an unrelated note, I haven't used an Iphone since 2018 and I wonder if Siri has gotten any better. I do see "Apple Intelligence" being advertised everywhere and besides AI summaries of texts on the notifications bar I haven't seen anything to understand what Apple Intelligence actually means.

      • embedding-shape 40 minutes ago |
        Yeah, hard to guess how a person would react to transformative technology, together with whatever context it'd be brought up, their reaction could differ.

        I too would say Jobs probably would have an human angle on it, but he also famously was a tyrant who struggled with people not doing exactly what he asked, and could be slightly nitpicky about that, maybe having a robot that follows exactly what he wrote, to a fault, would be a machine he'd greatly enjoy.

        Or he'd throw it in the trash with some flourish of words explaining how a machine could never feel frustrated so therefore couldn't great excellent products, or something.

      • porknbeans00 36 minutes ago |
        no this is a fair question. he was enough of a sociopath to disown his own kid, but his narcissistic tendencies and love of the arts would have been a weird counter point to that.
      • cheschire 33 minutes ago |
        His reaction probably still would not have been solidified yet, given how long his response took to other tectonic shifts in technology. That isn’t to say he wouldn’t have an opinion to voice, I just suspect it wouldn’t have resulted in a product direction for at least a few more years.
      • simonh 33 minutes ago |
        It's just a broad term for whatever AI integration they put into their various Apps and services. So, a combination of the neural engine stuff they've been doing for years, and integration with white label AI services from Google or OpenAI.

        Siri is basically unchanged, it looks like they have had serious problems getting LLMs, or generative AI in general to be reliable and 'safe' enough to put their own name on it. By 'safe' I mean thinks like not generating emails based on Mein Kampf, or doodles of genitals, or hallucinating false 'facts'.

        Not a concern for many of the frontier AI providers with no reputation to burn, but not exactly on-brand for Apple. I very much doubt Jobs would have viewed that differently.

        • limflick 18 minutes ago |
          How good is AI integration in Apple products? Did they drop the ball as hard as Microsoft did? I naively assumed a few years ago that Microsoft could pull it off perfectly because they had more than enough in terms of resources & engineers (yes, I was this naive in college)
      • latexr 25 minutes ago |
        > I wonder how Steve Jobs would've reacted to this GenAI boom.

        Steve believed “you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology”.

        https://youtu.be/EZll3dJ2AjY?t=114

        Which, to their credit, seems to be what Apple tried to do with Apple Intelligence and was already doing with Machine Learning. But if under Steve they had over promised and under delivered—like what happened under Cook—some heads would probably have rolled.

        > I wonder if Siri has gotten any better.

        Nope. There are rumours the new one will use Gemini and be better, but who knows. We’ve heard this before.

        > I haven't seen anything to understand what Apple Intelligence actually means.

        When it was announced, I thought it was a brilliant piece marketing in the sense of associating the “A” in AI with Apple. But then it turned out to be trash, so turns out the association is a hindrance. Anyway, you know how Microsoft uses “Copilot” for anything they ship which has “AI” in it? That’s Apple Intelligence. It’s the umbrella term for anything anywhere in one of their products where they use any kind of AI/ML.

      • jorvi 15 minutes ago |
        > I wonder how Steve Jobs would've reacted to this GenAI boom.

        Steve Jobs really cared about his users, and putting out great products for those users.

        I imagine he would have loved all the machine learning stuff that Apple has being doing the past few years (stuff like instant text OCR and photo object isolation).

        Based on the story about the first iPod being too big, dropping a prototype in a fish tank, lots of air bubbling up and him going "there's your space", or the disdain he displayed about how crappy Mobile.me was, I imagine he would have recognized LLMs for the flakey product they are and would have been very wary of introducing them into users their workflow.

        > .. and I wonder if Siri has gotten any better ..

        Siri is still crap, but so is Gemini. Both still do incredibly stupid stuff like when you try to request some music on Spotify "cannot find the artist or song 'My Playlist Hard Techno'" / play some unknown vaguely matching artist. Or it'll do an internet search for "goose oven cooking timer ten minutes". Or ask "for how long should I set your timer?" and name the timer "goose oven cooking timer ten minutes" which in a way is even more stupid.

        You'll get some naysayers here saying stuff works perfectly, but its that inconsistency that sucks. Sometimes it'll one-shot a really difficult voice command or obscure song search. And then other times (many times..) I have to yell at it three times to set a timer, at which point I sigh, realize doing it manually would've been faster, and set the timer manually.

        In a way its made me realize LLMs and voice assistants aren't that good, it's just that even tech people have incredibly low standards. Especially the people working in AI.

        • jcgrillo 3 minutes ago |
          [delayed]
    • embedding-shape 44 minutes ago |
      There seems to be a mental shift that happens around 30-50 (depending on the person) where the mindset changes from "How can I learn and contribute to world?" to "How can I make the world work the way I want?" and it's very noticeable in the public speaking engagements these people do, as this mindset seems to blend with all their other thoughts and feelings.

      Luckily, this doesn't seem to happen to everyone, especially if you aren't a public figure, a billionaire nor a successful startup founder, but that particular combination seems to make it extra likely you experience this transformation.

  • porknbeans00 37 minutes ago |
    good ole woz. being just a wonderful fuzzy warm hearted human being.
    • LatencyKills 32 minutes ago |
      I was fortunate to get to spend time with woz when I worked at Apple. He's the type of person who is practically silent during a meeting. Then, towards the end, he spoke up and would literally solve the problem we'd been struggling with the entire time.

      He's one of the nicest, most down-to-earth people I've ever worked with.

  • mustaphah 36 minutes ago |
    Can't locate the link to the actual speech
  • namenotrequired 35 minutes ago |
    The original title says he “got cheers” which is much less ambiguous than the HN title
    • weird-eye-issue 34 minutes ago |
      Not to me... Maybe a skill issue?
      • master-lincoln 24 minutes ago |
        "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence "

        Could be interpreted as Steve himself cheered. Or it could be interpreted as the passive which is meant here but I would argue it should then say "Steve Wozniak cheered at after telling..." but I am not a native speaker.

        The original title "Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak got cheers, not boos, after telling students they 'all have AI — actual intelligence'" can not be interpreted in the way that Steve cheered as far as I know.

        Where would the skill issue be? Please be specific.

        How is the original title not less ambiguous to you? Do you see other interpretations than I mentioned above or do you disagree with my interpretations?

        • robrain 7 minutes ago |
          Could also mean that he was cheered by the response to his comments and his disposition improved. There are layers of ambiguity in this headline.
    • qlm 32 minutes ago |
      In case it gets edited, the title of the HN submission is "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence".

      I laughed when I read this, imagining a weird act of self-congratulation in front of a silent audience.

    • CalRobert 22 minutes ago |
      I wonder if other languages are less ambiguous about this. "Steve Wozniak cheered" makes it sound like he did the cheering. But the practice of removing verbs from headlines makes this more ambiguous. "Car collides with bridge" is not a grammatically correct sentence but a perfectly normal headline.

      But in this case, "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI" _is_ a grammatically correct sentence, which means that Wozniak did the cheering, which may be the source of confusion. Or, perhaps it means not that he vocally cheered, but was cheered up emotionally.

      • xxs 4 minutes ago |
        >I wonder if other languages are less ambiguous about this.

        most are (few others I can speak). Generally, passive voice and past tense do not collide by having the exact same suffix

  • feverzsj 33 minutes ago |
    He also said he's not impressed by LLM, which I totally agree.
  • dchftcs 31 minutes ago |
    Unsurprising he'd be cheered for saying what they want to hear.

    But perhaps whether or not his stance is correct, the students needed to hear this. They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there's no point to try anymore.

    • bayindirh 16 minutes ago |
      Woz is a different kind of geek, appreciates the craft, and can sort out the cruft out of it.

      AI will be there, but it'll transform. When I say I don't use AI (i.e. LLMs, chat interfaces, agents and "autocomplete") for coding, research and whatnot, people label me as a luddite. The fact is I know how to use them. I test them from time to time. Occasionally these tools help. More often they hinder.

      "Resistance is futile, hand your brain over!" is a hype filled dystopian fatalism noting that future is inevitable. It's inevitable. You can use this correctly, and we don't got back to our senses to understand how to use this correctly and efficiently.

      We are just cooking our planet right now, with heat, poisoned water and slop.

  • lnsru 29 minutes ago |
    Actual intelligence is useless when decision makers send new weekly AI rules to be better employees. It’s race to the bottom. Race to an endless technical debt. Some companies will implode when codebases stop being manageable. The small minority will thrive. But majority not. I see it used in hardware world. Clever dudes without prior experience with software craft working Python scripts, automate tests, control hardware from rudimentary GUIs. That’s awesome. I see software companies sending internal memo requiring all code to be produced from prompts… It’s like steroids - cleverly used they bring more advantages, though one shouldn’t take double dose with every meal.
    • Oras 12 minutes ago |
      It’s not like code base written by developers before AI were manageable. The term tech debt was there way before AI coding, and was mainly due to changes made by developers.

      I see the point of your argument when this is done by inexperienced developers, as they wouldn’t know what’s happening but for those who knows and guide what has to be done, I don’t see much difference. It’s about understanding the outcome, and evaluating the risk.

      • bayindirh 10 minutes ago |
        Tech debt is a debt taken to reduce development time. It's a time debt actually. Patching something that would work until the team has the time to do it correctly.

        ...and that time never comes in most cases. Because monies are earned in exchanged for that debt and, management cares about monies. They don't see that debt as important, or as debt at all.

    • Jtarii 12 minutes ago |
      Companies that use AI well will replace the companies that use AI badly. There is no world in which AI is not used extensively in all employment going forward.
    • eloisius 10 minutes ago |
      It may be useful outside the current tech rat race. One possibility is that a decade of openly user-hostile business decisions will reach their logical conclusion even faster, and those that haven’t fried our brains with CC may be in a position to pick up customers from these behemoths as they disintegrate.
  • vasco 27 minutes ago |
    Actual link to the quote video: https://youtu.be/S24CGNgqZJA
  • Aboutplants 22 minutes ago |
    Finally someone smart enough to read the room!
  • theow838484jj 16 minutes ago |
    There was study that big percentage of university graduates, strugles to comprehend written text. In AI terms: take 20k token paper, feed it to well rested graduate, and they will strugle with basic memory recall, reasoning and comprehension! My laptop performs better than that!
    • irishcoffee 11 minutes ago |
      Ah studies, those things nobody ever cares to reproduce.

      At least you provided a source! Er… wait, you didn’t even tell us your laptop model, describe the paper other than in terms of token size, or where these well rested graduate students (read: unicorns) hide from the rest of the world.

      Give it a bit more effort next time.

      • theow838484jj 6 minutes ago |
        20k tokens is about 40 pages of text. Weekly i do about 1000x that.

        I really do not think there is a point to argue here.

    • limflick 10 minutes ago |
      I haven't read the study, but I wonder if one reason comprehension went down was because of over-reliance on AI among students.
      • theow838484jj 5 minutes ago |
        Ai is around for a few years. This type of studies goes back decades.
  • jdmoreira 5 minutes ago |
    It’s sad that we ended up here. I can’t fathom that young people aren’t excited about technology anymore.

    I was young once and naive, and I read a bunch of sci-fi. I could never have imagined having these LLMs or coding agents during my lifetime. Never. It was unthinkable to me that something like this could even happen.

    And yet, here we are.

    Even if you think it’s just a statistical trick, you should still be blown away.

    You should also be optimistic, because that’s what we need young people for. We used to be able to convince young people to get on boats and migrate halfway around the world to die on some godforsaken land. Or get on boats and go fight some ideological war somewhere else (not saying that was a good thing). But now we can’t even get them excited about technology?

    What have we done?

    People used to have nothing. My grandfather got his first pair of shoes when he was 10 years old. Yet he was more joyful and positive than most people alive today.