Steve Jobs, the late co-founder of Apple, may have predicted the rise of AI chatbots like ChatGPT over 40 years ago. In a newly released clip from 1983, Jobs described a machine that could encapsulate a person’s “underlying spirit, or underlying set of principles, or any underlying way of looking at the world.

Jobs envisioned a future where people could ask questions to a machine that had been fed all the works and knowledge of a historical figure like Aristotle. When the next Aristotle comes around, maybe if he carries around one of these machines with him his or her whole life, and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday after the person’s dead and gone, we can ask this machine, ‘Hey, what would Aristotle have said?'” Jobs said during a speech at the 1983 International Design Conference.

Fast forward to today, and we have Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT that can interpret prompts and generate human-like responses based on vast amounts of training data. While not perfect, these AI chatbots seem to be catching up to Jobs’ vision from four decades ago. This isn’t the first time Jobs’ predictions have come true.

In a 1985 Playboy interview, he foresaw that computers would become essential in most homes, at a time when less than 10% of U.S. households owned one.

Jobs’ vision for AI chatbots

Now, around 95% have at least one computing device.

Jobs also predicted in that same interview that people would use computers to connect with each other online, years before the World Wide Web was invented. There are now close to 1.88 billion websites as of 2021. The tech industry is now pursuing the next frontier – Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) that can match or surpass human abilities.

Opinions vary on when we might achieve AGI, with some like Elon Musk expressing optimism while others believe we are still years away. Regardless, the newly released footage of Steve Jobs’ 1983 speech shows once again why he was considered a visionary in the tech world. His predictions continue to be proven accurate decades later, as computers and AI transform how we live and interact with technology.