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Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

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Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#231

Post by abirch »

romaniv wrote: post #212
joe_mamba wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* * *

>Would you prefer the harsh unpopular truth of Erich Schmidt, or a sweet lie of Wozniak? What Erich Schmidt is doing is not about describing hard reality. He is trying to make a particular version of the future come true by painting it as inevitable. It's literally a propaganda technique.

"The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed."

AI has made my life so much easier. If I need to change non-standard lightbulbs (e.g., G9, MR11, A19), I'm taking a picture and asking my AI what kind are they. If I need to create the first pass of test scripts, I ask my AI. It's reduced technical debt and let me focus on the things I care about.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#232

Post by [deleted] »

kolinko wrote: post #190
leonidasrup wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as it costs Woz nothing to be AI sceptic, Erich Schmidt has to loose much if AI investments don't deliver. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/21/eric-schmidts-family-office-...

Which, one might argue, shows he believes it. He's putting money where his mouth is.

[deleted]

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#233

Post by naravara »

joe_mamba wrote: post #217
crispyambulance wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From which would you take advice, the successful entrepreneur/investor, or the nice hacker geek [?] The nice hacker geek? By the way, the Woz has a net-worth of 140MM, so he's more wealthy that the vast majority of "successful entrepreneur/investors", and also vastly more beloved than virtually all of them. In any case, that's a false dichotomy and actually the wrong question entirely.

>By the way, the Woz has a net-worth of 140MM, so he's more wealthy that the vast majority of "successful entrepreneur/investors", So are a lot of people who invested(gambled) early in Bitcoin and Tesla, that doesn't mean people should take career advice from them just because they managed to make a lot of money. But if you design and developed several successful tech products in your career, I think people should at…

Funny thing about Steve Jobs is that he actually didn’t deliver a single home run until his return to Apple late in his career.

The Apple II was Woz, the Mac was okay but mostly got shepherded into what it was by the other Apple leadership, the Lisa was a flop, Pixar he was an investor but was mostly Lasseter’s baby, NeXt went nowhere until the Apple acquisition.

The guy had somehow managed to make a successful career out of shipping very opinionated, interesting, and cool products that were commercial failures. If you were going purely by commercial performance you would not have picked him, you’d be picking him based on that ineffable reality distortion field of his that makes you BELIEVE everything he’s doing will change the world.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#235

Post by zamadatix »

bko wrote: post #185
joe_mamba wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* * *

I agree Woz is a sweet lie how everyone is unique and a snowflake. But regarding "you can be anything you want to be if you just work hard and apply yourselves, the world is your oyster, etc", I think the problem is the work hard part. Plenty of people have the wrong dreams, like being an influencer, but how many actually work hard. Like spend 60 hours a week analyzing youtube videos to find the perfect thumbnail or…

A lot of people work extremely hard towards their dream to fail. Which is fine, but when you start out life being told if you just keep trying and it'll happen then it can quickly destroy the golden years of your career/life. This is often varying per goals too. Just because you love football does not mean you're going to be able to be a pro player just because you spent every hour on it. You're probably better off e joying football, doing enough to get a scholarship, and finding something else to build your life goals around.

If you want to take yourself from where you are to the best chances at your dream, work as hard as you can towards it. But it's also more than fine if you don't want to take that risk, you can often have a perfectly good life without working yourself to death on the promise it'll make your dreams come true if you do.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#236

Post by SecretDreams »

bdangubic wrote: post #189
contravariant wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've somehow confused using AI well with using it extensively. Sometimes using something well involves not using it at all.

not using it at all is no longer an option, companies that are not using it at all will die slow/fast death but death nonetheless.

Ironically, companies overusing it will probably die at a similar speed. Maybe faster, even, depending whether cash burn or technical debt catches up to them first.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#237

Post by foltik »

kolinko wrote: post #190
leonidasrup wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as it costs Woz nothing to be AI sceptic, Erich Schmidt has to loose much if AI investments don't deliver. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/21/eric-schmidts-family-office-...

Which, one might argue, shows he believes it. He's putting money where his mouth is.

More like his mouth goes wherever the money is.

Obvious to the grads he’s yet another “visionary” corporate hack waxing to them about how they’d better not miss the AI rocket ship.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#238

Post by oulipo2 »

alsetmusic wrote: post #90

The man is hailed as a brilliant nerd in our circles. I didn't realize he's a great public speaker. He really read the room. The "McKenzie"-style lady and Schmidt from Google (who really seemed to resent the pushback and chided graduates), can go to hell. I'm happy that someone is telling the young people who are likely to suffer because of this tech that they matter. I can't imagine how much angst much exist after t…

It's not that hard to "read the room" when you're a humanist, and not a sociopathic tech CEO... you just speak your mind, and you realize that your fellow humans are onboard with you

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#239

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

ElevenLathe wrote: post #139
holtkam2 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I think of it has evolved a lot over the last 5 years. At this point I think human brains probably do something analogous to next token prediction when we think. For all the hype, I think LLMs are actually more , not less, intelligent than that average person realizes. I think it’s legit, actual intelligence, not just “artificial” intelligence. That may be a hot take but it’s just my perception.

It's language. Language itself is the thing that makes us smart in the unique way that we are among the other animals, and it weirdly turns out to be transferable to machines to at least some degree.

At least 50% of humans have no "inner voice" and are not thinking in the same way as you. Many animals like dolphins, dogs, rats, crows are also very intelligent yet appear to only have primitive language capabilities.

A lot of human intelligence is really societal rather than individual, based on knowledge transmitted down through generations by writing (the real enabler). If you take that away then what you are left with is something more like an isolated hunter-gather tribe.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#240

Post by testfrequency »

evilduck wrote: post #102
testfrequency wrote: post #88

I cannot stress how much the deep internal Apple loyalists loathe Woz. I personally find him one of the best parts of (old) Apple, and it’s a shame the company internally continues to think of him as a loose cannon.

How many people from that era still exist at Apple to be holding a grudge like that? Genuinely curious, since it's been a very long time since he was last involved at Apple.

A lot. Apple has pretty impressive retention, more than everywhere else I’ve worked in the Bay Area. Many people work there to retire, so the age demographic skews older. I worked there close to 20 years and that’s not even in the longer end comparatively.

Also Woz still goes to campus every so often, it’s not like he’s banned or not accessible. Deep loyalists though love to mock him for being a bit…too honest…which I find unfortunate because he is honestly a very kind and fun person. I’ve spent time with Woz, and have nothing but positive things to say about him.

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