Apple founder Steve Jobs are right about a lot of things when it came to technology, but little did he know how on the money he was with one astute prediction in 1985, as he seemingly foresaw the rise of AI and ChatGPT.
You can see Steve Jobs' fingerprints across everything Apple has ever produced, and the tech visionary is a big reason why they've now become the single most valuable company in the entire world.
From the very first Apple 1 computer to the smartphone revolution brought on by the iPhone, Jobs remained a forward-facing figure in the tech world who was always looking for that next innovative move.
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He might just have been 40 years ahead of the curve back in 1985 though, as Jobs seemingly 'predicted' the creation of ChatGPT and other AI assistants when talking about what he calls 'free intellectual energy'.
As shared by appledsign on Instagram, Jobs illustrates how technology might be able to 'capture' the minds of great thinkers in years to come:
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"My hope is that in our lifetimes, it will happen within 20 years, it probably will happen within 10 years, we can make a tool of an interactive kind [...] We are entering a new revolution - free intellectual energy.
"It's getting more refined year after year after year, and in our lifetimes it should get very refined."
While this initially could perhaps point towards the rise of free information through the internet and social media, Jobs' next point specifically echoes much of what we can now see reflected in the development of generative artificial intelligence chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT.
"So my hope is someday when the next Aristotle is alive, we can capture the underlying world view of that Aristotle in a computer, and someday some student will be able to not only read the words Aristotle wrote but ask Aristotle a question and get an answer."
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That sounds eerily close to what you can now roughly achieve with modern AI - especially when you consider the rise of apps like CharacterAI that specialize in replications of specific individuals.
You can get ChatGPT to speak to you in a particular dialect or vernacular, you can ask an AI recreation of Nostradamus for new predictions of the future, and you can even engage in an 18+ 'Sexy Mode' with Elon Musk's Grok, if that floats your boat.
Jobs might have been a few decades off with his prediction, but he was certainly on the money when it came to what would eventually emerge from technology of the future. Little did he know that even he would become the subject of an AI chatbot himself.