Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple (AAPL), isn’t quite convinced by A.I.’s truth-telling skills just yet. Given the technology’s potential to provide false outputs or “hallucinate,” strategies around preventing misinformation need to be tightened. “It’s very hard to do fact-checking on A.I., so we need to work in that direction,” Wozniak said during Civo’s Navigate North America event in San Francisco earlier this month. “Trustability is very important to me.”
This isn’t the first time the entrepreneur has raised concerns about A.I.’s potential to mislead—he’s previously proposed that A.I. chatbots should cite sources and references for their outputs, like citations seen in scientific journals. Allowing users to see where A.I. answers come from will enable them to analyze “what’s real or not,” he said.
When asked about his thoughts on the rapid pace of A.I. progress, Wozniak also noted that A.I. developers should never discount the power of the human brain. He recalled an experience in high school where he attempted to write a program to solve a mathematical chess puzzle before realizing it would take “10 to the 27th years” to solve—a length of time exceeding the age of the universe. “I started thinking: the human brain can come up with algorithms to solve these problems, and a raw, fast computer with high speed can’t,” said Wozniak.
Wozniak, 74, co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs in 1976. It’s hard to imagine a time when Apple wasn’t known as the world’s leading tech company. But during its early days, its intuitive interface was an anomaly in the industry—an approach that today’s A.I. companies would do well to emulate, Wozniak said.
“To me, intuitiveness is humanness. Technology needs the work put into it to work in a human way, rather than the human having to modify everything they do in life to match the technology the way it is,” he said.
Apple pioneered the design of user-friendly features that have become the industry norm today. Its popularization of the computer mouse, simple icons and its “drag-and-drop” tool, for example, allowed users to carry out complex tasks without typing in long computer commands.
“We got a reputation for ease of use, and that helped guide our culture of the company today,” said Wozniak. “I’m always for the consumer, the user, over the producer who’s getting all the money.”
The entrepreneur additionally provided three key pieces of advice for young, aspiring startup founders: A business-oriented mindset is the most important, followed by marketing skills and great engineers. “We had all three in Apple, and then you can build on from that,” he said.
Guaranteeing a trajectory similar to Apple’s, however, is another matter. Despite having had faith in his company, Wozniak, who left Apple in 1985, said he could never have imagined just how large Apple—now the world’s most valuable publicly listed company with a market cap of $3.6 trillion—would become. “I knew it was going to be very successful—not as successful as we see today,” he said.
