Newly released footage reveals Steve Jobs predicted ChatGPT over 40 years ago

• A new exhibition from the Steve Jobs archive reveals Jobs’ 1983 vision for generative AI.
• Jobs envisioned AI as a book that users could ask questions to and interact with.
• Today’s AI-powered chatbots are already fulfilling Jobs’ vision.

Sometimes, the best ideas aren’t the new ones. Even the most exciting technology right now—chatbots powered by generative AI—was something of a Steve Jobs It is expected to revolutionize our world.

a New Digital Exhibition From the Steve Jobs archives including footage From Jobs’s 1983 presentation at the Aspen International Design Conference. In it, the Apple founder talks about the promise of a new technology that could answer questions and think like a human. In his view, it was the natural successor to the book.

The book he discovered in his college days, Jobs said, “was something extraordinary. It went straight from the source to the destination with nothing in between.” The problem was that there was no way to interact with it. Whether Jobs was reading Plato or Aristotle or something else, he didn’t like that he couldn’t stop and ask a question about the text.

His hope for the future was as follows:

“I think that when we look out into the next 50 to 100 years, if we can really come up with these machines that can capture a basic ethos, a basic set of principles, a basic way of looking at the world, then when the next Aristotle comes along, maybe if he carries one of these machines with him his whole life, his whole life, and writes all this stuff down, then maybe one day after the person is dead and gone, we can ask this machine, ‘Hey, what would Aristotle have said?’”

It’s been a little over 40 years since Jobs’ speech, and the world seems to be on its way to developing these machines. AI companies are training AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT using data from books and other sources to answer users’ questions. Some of them will even respond as if they were famous historical figuresSometimes they get their facts right and sometimes they don’t, as Jobs predicted, but it’s a new way to interact with people, ideas, and history.