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Steve Wozniak

Steve Wozniak5 posts
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1 Apr, 1976

Found company

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Wozniak and JobsJobs, Wozniak, and Wayne sign Apple Computer into existence out of the garage of Jobs’ parents’ home in Los Altos, California. The trio sign a 45-45-10 percent agreement in Wayne’s apartment in Mountain View. The agreement reads:

Wozniak shall assume both general and major responsibility for the conduct of Electrical Engineering; Jobs shall assume general responsibility Electrical Engineering and Marketing, and Wayne shall assume major responsibility for Mechanical Engineering and Documentation.

3 Jan, 1977

Incorporation

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imageSteve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne register the corporation Apple Computer, Inc. under the laws of the State of California. The official logo for the corporation is an Apple with a bite taken out.

2007

Wozniak interview

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Livingston interviews Wozniak for Founders At Work about starting Apple. His advice for people considering starting a startup:

First of all, try to have the highest of ethics and to be open and truthful about things, not hiding. If you have to hide something for company reasons, at least explain what you’re doing. Don’t mislead people. Know in your heart that you are a good person with good goals because that will carry over to your own self-confidence and your belief in your engineering abilities. Always seek excellence: make your product better than the average person would.

23 Mar, 2015

‘Computers are going to take over from humans, no question.’

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In an interview with The Australian Financial Review, Wozniak discusses a wide range of technology issues. He says he hopes Apple will get into the automotive industry and compete with Tesla.

There are an awful lot of companies right now who are playing with electric cars and there’s a lot more playing with self-driving cars, this is the future and it might be huge … there are so many openings here and it is perfect territory for a company like Apple…it seems like they might be hiring a lot of people who could really build a vehicle.

He goes on to talk about his growing unease with the increasing sophistication of artificial intelligence. He says he has come to realize that the warnings of writers about machine intelligence outstripping human understanding or capability within the next thirty years were coming true. Computing that either mimicked or attained human consciousness could become a reality.

Computers are going to take over from humans, no question…I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people. If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they’ll think faster than us and they’ll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently….Will we be the gods? Will we be the family pets? Or will we be ants that get stepped on? I don’t know about that … But when I got that thinking in my head about if I’m going to be treated in the future as a pet to these smart machines … well I’m going to treat my own pet dog really nice.

30 Mar, 2023

Musk, Wozniak, join thousands calling for AI slowdown

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More than 1,000 artificial intelligence experts, researchers and backers, including Musk and Wozniak, sign an open letter calling for an immediate pause on the creation of ‘giant’ AIs for at least six months, so the capabilities and dangers of systems such as GPT-4 can be properly studied and mitigated.

Recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control…Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable…

We agree [with Sam Altman that it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models.] That point is now.

If researchers will not voluntarily pause their work on AI models more powerful than GPT-4, the letter’s benchmark for “giant” models, then “governments should step in”, the authors say.

“This does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely a stepping back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities

[Link to letter]