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LLMs echo Steve Jobs' vision for the future of computing
Steve Jobs in 1977 talking about (Apple) computers is a great way to describe GPT-4, ChatGPT, and other advancements in LLMs today:
There's this feedback it gives to people, and the enthusiasm of the users is amazing. People always ask what it can do, and it can do a lot of things, but in my opinion, the real thing it's doing right now is teaching people how to program the computer.
From a design conference in Aspen (1983):
The problem was, you can’t ask Aristotle a question. And I think, as we look towards the next fifty to one hundred years, if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying spirit, or an underlying set of principles, or an underlying way of looking at the world, then, when the next Aristotle comes around, maybe if he carries around one of these machines with him his whole life—his or her whole life—and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday, after this person’s dead and gone, we can ask this machine, “Hey, what would Aristotle have said? What about this?” And maybe we won’t get the right answer, but maybe we will. And that’s really exciting to me. And that’s one of the reasons I’m doing what I’m doing.
While these models aren't perfect and do have their limitations, they're definitely moving toward the vision he shared.