Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak demanded more honesty from today’s AI soaked tech industry at Civo’s Navigate conference in San Francisco this week.
In a fireside chat with Civo CEO Mark Boost, Wozniak recounted his path into computing, the early days of Apple, his ongoing fascination with technology and his preference for being an engineer rather than a business person.
But a common theme throughout his career was honesty and trust, he said. “To me, all the good things you'll do in your life really stems being totally honest and that's just hard to count on these days.”
He explicitly expressed concern about AI’s impact on these core values. Wozniak cited the well-known instances of lawyers depending on “case law” they had researched via Gen AI, only to realise – in court – that the precedents they’d cited were mere hallucinations. “It’s very hard to do the fact checking on AI, so we need to work in that direction.”
He said “trustability is very important to me [which] means things come out one way, only one way, and they're always correct.”
This was “very difficult” to achieve with AI. “You should be told which AI, how is it trained? And if you train your own AI, what was it trained on? And it should have citations like scientific journal articles.”
Users should be able to click on results and see where on the internet an AI found the information, he said, “to help you find out what’s real and what’s not.”
While he said AI could be really useful, Wozniak was sceptical about it replacing everything a human can do. “AI can understand a story about a dog being rescued by a human, but can't have the feelings. AI can't cry.”
He also expressed concern about AI companies hoovering up content without credit or payment to creators. “There's a reason that patents and trademarks are in our Constitution.”
It’s not just AI that needed a dose of honesty and truth though. They were also essential in today’s engineers, Wozniak said, and the startups they produced. ”Don't say something just because it sounds good,” he advised. “Make sure it is right.”
“Some people just are good at words and wording things,” he said. This is the man who worked with Steve Jobs after all.
But, he said, “No, it'll catch you up. And especially if you're young, and just starting, you say what you do know, what you're sure of.”
While many startup founders took the business school route, created a business plan, sought VC cash and then hired engineers, Wozniak said this was the wrong way round.
“I say, ‘No, no, I'm an engineer, and trust me’… the engineers are so clever at solving problems all the time… let them come up with the here's what our company is going to be about.”
Marketing and business skills were essential, he said. But engineers brought the creativity. “How does [AI] make something that’s never been discussed or done? Humans can somehow.”
