alt Hacker NewsSteve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence
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Interesting times we observe. I don't recall such a massive rupture in opinions about modern technology. Even fight over blockchain and NFTs looks minuscule compared to AI.
Engineers always fought about technology - MS technology stack iterations that promised new era in development, Borland RAD tools that made everyone "GUI developer", all those had evangelists and companies who pushed it. It's a healthy competition and we see where Java EE ended up, although in 2010s it was still promised as one and only future for servers.
Will this time be different? I don't know and I'm afraid there's a critical mass accumulated to push it forward forcefully. But when I talk to my friends and students I give one advice that I follow - invest in your intelligence, not tooling and ecosystem of large corporations. Build something yourself, not for the sake of chasing venture investors with your million LOC slope, but to learn and master real skills. When one student implemented Paxos for his thesis and followed my advice, the feedback was that not only he learned and built a mental model of the algorithm and all corner cases, but also led to novel algorithm development, just because his brain was into it, not on top of AI.
Unsurprising he'd be cheered for saying what they wanted 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'd be no point to try anymore.
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.
Wozniak has discussed his personal disdain for money and accumulating large amounts of wealth. He told Fortune magazine in 2017, "I didn't want to be near money, because it could corrupt your values ... I really didn't want to be in that super 'more than you could ever need' category."
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak
Stark contrast to other tech leaders...
This past fall I overheard a conversation between some high schoolers where one of the students was taking classes remotely for a while as she was dealing with some mental issues. She complained that while she needed the time away, it was just so easy to cheat with ChatGPT and be done with school for the day, and she went on to say that she really felt like she wasn’t learning anything and really was looking forward to returning to the classroom. This has stuck with me as the group of kids were just your average punk/emo high school kids.
Kids want to learn, they value learning, they get a sense of pride and accomplishment when they learn new things and concepts.
I bet Eric's used AI to review his speech, and it told him it was brilliant. He had never bombed before, so him being booed was not in the training data. In a sense, kids booing shows is exactly the difference between AI and our unpredictable mind. This is innovation as far as commencement speeches are concerned.
Haha this is a totally Woz thing to do <3
He's a genuinely nice guy, not one of those hard-as-nails business types like most IT CEOs. I'd love to work for a company he'd run. It might not be as successful as the others but you would know you're actually doing good things for people. Unlike other companies that put Don't be Evil in their mottoes but are evil as hell.
Recently there was a flood of articles about "students are using AI to cheat". Now there's a flood of articles about "students are anti AI".
My first impression is that floods of articles do not accurately reflect the real world, but just show some facet of it. But if they are both correct and both are to be taken as real, should we expect that students will agree with academia and not use AI in their education? Might we see the return of traditional learning?
(Education is different than our industry. In our industry, most of those using LLMs are forced to by the powers to be. In education, the powers to be do not want the students to use LLMs.)
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.
The original title says he “got cheers” which is much less ambiguous than the HN title
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.
Personally, I think Jensen Huang had the most relevant message in his 2024 graduation speech; it transcends AI or any other contemporary issues, and it is simultaneously something people might not want to hear yet something they need to:
"I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering."
good ole woz. being just a wonderful fuzzy warm hearted human being.
I have been seeing so many bad commencement speeches that it's good to see someone actually deliver a nuanced and grounded approach that speaks to the issues of our time. Woz has definitely improved a lot in his public speaking over the years.
Everyone was hating on the Google CEO but I really almost had a crash out of how out of touch Scott Borchetta sounded on stage too. Glad there's one good Apple out there.
This whole situation with students cheering and booing is kind of strange.
Aren't students, at least anecdotally, outsourcing a lot of _their_ work to LLMs? And upon graduation when they're told that it's their future they don't like it?
He seems to be a nice guy and this contrasts with big tech CEOs, but this is pretty demagogical. AI is going to causing disruption but is here to stay, so what should be done about it? "Think different", "you have actual intelligence" may be comforting and enough to be cheered but is not a very actionable advice.
Since no one here has linked the full speech, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlbO7oFmEhg
Maybe I am in a minority position here, but despite me vibecoding for many months now (havent written a single line by hand and forced me todo so in the beginning), I still have my IDE open right next to Codex/CC and while the LLM is crucnching along and doing TDD loops I actually read whats created/changed and just sit with it judding if its only right on surface or semantically stupid underneath, essentially realtime-architecting and steering the code agents sometimes even midflight. so I do end up with these 200k+ LoC projects now since typing is lightning fast and 2/3 of my codebase is tests (I insist on regression tests after every steer) but in fact I perfectly know what each piece is doing and where it is, as well as the still not optimal parts and have a mental list for refactoring it later when I have time or a spare parallel agent can do it when feature work isn't crossing the same areas.
so I COULD take over by hand again like I did the decades before just fine, but I refuse to and instead play a codebase like a RTS - lots of stuff happening in parallel but at all times a understanding where is which thing going on and have the next steps in mind (sometimes directly queued as follow up instructions). For me vibecoding is a strict speedboost and literally gamified projects I work on, and the guardrails not only in textfiles but much more in executable code (linters, tests, dependency checks, playwright, ...) as feedback loops agents can spin on on their own made it all click together to the point my main bottleneck is stuff like the Codex app itself using high CPU and memory on my local mac.
Woz rizz, Jobs dead
Real "plutonians cheering being told that Pluto is a real planet" energy.
I always thought it means "authentic Italian"
He also said he's not impressed by LLM, which I totally agree.
Actual link to the quote video: https://youtu.be/S24CGNgqZJA
Populist , let’s invent Make intelligence great again :)
Finally someone smart enough to read the room!
Artificial Intelligence, Actual Intelligence, Artificial Intelligentsia - I’d argue that one of them is not real.
Wozniak is a man of the people.
One perhaps unpopular opinion: Could it be that the current AI is beneficial for young people in the sense that it is making them stop looking at their phone for a bit, and realize that certain tech is not that important for human well beeing? The change is in their/our hands after all, we just need to become aware, believe and vote with our wallet and the whole society will change in the blink of an eye. The hard part is the awareness and believing.
This title makes me feel he cheered, not that he was cheered at.
Out of all of the OG “pirates of Silicon Valley” - Woz was always the coolest to me.
This contrast is a bit sad. When Eric Schmidt told students the truth about the importance that AI will take in the future ("It will touch every profession, every lab..."), students booked him But the takes like "AI is not real/powerful, human intelligence is better", which are basically pleasant myopic lies, are cheered. Cope bias is powerful.
Man... it's gonna absolutely suck when that guy dies.
>have AI actual intelligence
AI stands for artificial intelligence. Trying to give it an opposite meaning just is going to confuse everyone.
>Is there a way we can duplicate a routine a trillion times and have it work like a brain? AI is one of those attempts.
AI is not trying to recreate a brain. It is trying to implement intelligence. GPT works nothing like the brain works.
This is typical for a university though. All they do is teach you things that are not really true. If you asked AI what AI stood and what it means you will get a much better answer than this Steve guy.
Wiz is the shit. The end.
These students? They are the worst students in decades if there is any generation that could be replaced by machines it's the latest.
There's been a massive mask-off shift amongst elites* the last few years where displaying open contempt and hatred towards normal people - employees, students, public servants, etc. You can see this most clearly near the epicentre of the SV executive class where layoffs are celebrated and the life of the remaining employees is made as shitty as possible (ie, Meta's keyloggers), but it is everywhere. Speakers gleefully mocking and chiding graduates about how fucked they are due to AI, opinion columns from oligarch-owned mass media about how ungrateful everyone is towards the president, democratic senators (!!) mocking their constituents for wanting health insurance, just absolute disgust and hatred dripping everywhere.
* Here I'm using the alternate definition of elite - someone with money, power, position, or privilege - and not the conventional "barista with hair colour".
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I actually disagree with Steve here.
This is propagating the Dunning Kruger effect.
Anyone with a sub 100 IQ should be using AI nearly blindly for questions and life decisions. However, these exact people don't realize AI is smarter than them.
I think we are going to witness a division on a monumental level in our lifetime. People willing to use AI, and people not willing. (However, people not willing will be able to get to speed in literal seconds).
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.
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!
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 taking on debt to get an education and then this is the job market.