Scandi Apple geeks interested in getting the skinny on any upcoming product developments around the mooted OLED iPad or the firm’s secret GenAI division may have been left in the dark as Apple founder Stephen Wozniak took to the stage last Friday to deliver the closing keynote at The Tech Arena in Stockholm.
While the engineering brains behind Apple’s first two computers might still be on Apple’s payroll, it’s been in a ceremonial capacity since he stepped down in 1985.
The 7,000-strong crowd, however, were in for an illuminating retrospective tour of his illustrious engineering career as Woz delivered the closing keynote to Sweden’s largest tech event, which, the organisers revealed, was put together in just six months.
As its ambassador, Apple’s history according to Wozniak, is certainly different to the one audience will have seen through the lens of the Danny Boyle-directed 2015 biopic, on his cofounder, Steve Jobs.
There doesn’t appear to be much love lost between Wozinak and his late friend – whom he became close with when they both worked at HP – but there’s no bitterness there either, even when he delivers such gems as this:
“Steve would go off and say something and you’d assume that it came from him, but often you’d find that came from somewhere else. There was a lot of that.”
He credits Jobs as being the business brains behind the operation but also sings the praises of Apple’s lesser known third cofounder, the business angel Mike Markkula who bankrolled the first 1,000 Apple II computers and whom they relied on for marketing nous and practical advice.
“He was the adult in the room,” Wozniak recalled. “He told us: ‘Don’t hire kids’ – even though we were kids – hire people who’ve had success in their chosen fields.”
Yet the idea was never really to start a company, Woz told the event’s chief interviewer, journalist and comms specialist Linda Nyberg, “it was to get my engineering seen by the world.”
Once the duo convinced Markkula to back them, Woz explained how they dined out on the same commercially successful computer model, the Apple II, for ten years.
“Do companies like Apple come from engineering or business and vision? Well, we became a big Fortune 100-based company just on one product. Jobs would tell us ‘We got to have new computers!’ but he didn’t understand computer hardware and software,” Wozniak said.
Wozniak also recalls selling his stock to five founder employees of Apple – something Jobs famously refused to do. “There were us three of us founders with infinite income for life and there were these other people there from the start – so then I also sold other parts of my stock to everybody working for the company.”
Woz is not a tech billionaire. He claims to have given away most of his fortune to various charities and museums (including the Bay Area city he was born in, San Jose, which named the road ‘Woz Way’ after him “that’s something money just can’t buy!”).
At present, Wozniak spends time teaching in schools for free and, while he’s reported to have a few hundred million in the bank, he claimed that he still needs to earn a living, which includes carrying out public speaking at events around the world “over 100 a year, I’m always on planes”.
Wozniak isn’t that impressed with buzzy generative AI, even though Apple is currently rumoured to be secretly building a gen AI division.
“Who needs that much information? If you want to figure out how to solve problem at work, you go to your search engine you get your results from and figure out how to write a piece of Linux code or whatever.
“But if you go to AI and it just comes back with more spelled out results and strategies for something that you want to do and it sounds so smart – but the trouble is that it’s boring, often there’s just too much to read.”
According to Woz, other AI-generated reports are just dull because they are devoid of emotion, given that AI can only relate to emotions as other humans have expressed them. For this reason, he finds it hard to see how firms can rely on AI alone to make decisions.
“People have to have an emotional reason to make a decision,” he reasoned.
He recounted a story about a professor in Nashville who allows his students to use AI to help them with their papers.
“He’s never given more than a C+ to one because they are just not that good. The human needs to be the editor,” he added.
“The AI is like a ton of reporters bringing the information in, but you need a human to condense it to work out what matters the most. And to express it to someone else in a way that is sellable. Even in your company.”
In terms of AI bias, Wozniak warned that it might be hard to programme against it.
“We’re told we must programme against the biases. But biases are cultures and cultures do matter depending on where you are. You can’t have one AI that is attentive to all the cultures.”
On a practical note, Wozniak proposed taking a ‘scientific journal’ approach to AI-generated content.
“You need to say when something has been AI-generated but there’s also a need for tags so you can click on parts of it to get it to show you what part of networks it was trained on what question it was asked to bring that answer.
“Scientific journals have attribution numbers, and you build science this way. AI should be no different You should be able to click on any statement so that you know where it came from.”
One nascent technology that does excite him (“and I’ve been on this one track for 20 years”) is optical computing or photonic computing.
This technology uses light waves produced by visible laser light or infrared (IR) beams instead of electric currents to process data.
An electric current flow at only about 10% of the speed of light, but by applying visible light and/or IR networks at the device and component scale, a computer might one day be developed that can perform operations ten or more times faster than a classical computer.
“Electrons do not go at the speed of light, but photons do,” he explained,
However, he acknowledges that building the technology is a complex process: “What you need is a way to amplify a beam and invert it. And you need a logic gate so that two signals go in and two come out.”
It also requires larger chips, he added, meaning current optical prototypes are bulky.
Why do we need these computers? This all ties into Apple’s and Wozniak’s original vision of creating faster processors that are accessible to everyone to create new photorealistic worlds and new ways of working.
“We are not there yet. We need to improve the bandwidth of the internet and processing ability to handle the kinds of worlds that are coming. We need faster processing: that’s been key my whole life.”
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