Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

Reaction to Wozniak’s Speech and “Actual Intelligence”

• Many welcomed the human-centric, affirming focus on students’ own minds, especially contrasted with more techno-fatalist commencement talks.
• Some see the line as necessary hope for graduates facing debt and a bleak job market, even if it tells them what they want to hear.
• Others criticize it as shallow populism and not actionable guidance in a world where AI is clearly not going away.

AI’s Power, Hype, and Limits

• Views range from “revolutionary, actual intelligence” to “autocomplete on steroids” and “slop.”
• Supporters emphasize language as central to human intelligence, seeing LLMs as surprisingly capable and general.
• Skeptics point to nondeterminism, hallucinations, weak reasoning, and poor reliability; they argue it’s iterative on search, not a step-change.
• Debate over terminology: some insist current systems are legitimately “AI,” others see “AI” as a shifting marketing label distinct from AGI.

Work, Coding, and Technical Debt

• Reports of modest productivity gains (≈10–30%) from coding assistants and agents; helpful for boilerplate, refactors, and small fixes.
• Strong concerns that agents require constant expert supervision, so net cost savings are dubious.
• Many fear AI will accelerate low-quality code and technical debt because management optimizes for “cheap + fast,” not quality.
• “Tokenmaxxing” anecdotes: companies pushed to maximize AI usage, racking up large bills without clear ROI; worry about rising model costs and subsidized pricing ending.

Students, Jobs, and Education

• Students both use AI (for homework, sometimes cheating) and resent it as a threat to entry-level jobs and their degrees’ value.
• Some fear AI will hollow out the learning process in programming/writing, producing graduates with weak fundamentals.
• Broader anxiety: first cohort expected to work harder than their parents yet achieve less, with AI framed as a job destroyer rather than empowerment.

Big Tech, Politics, and Power

• Deep skepticism that voting or regulation can meaningfully “rein in” big tech given campaign finance, lobbying, and bipartisan corporate dependence.
• Many see AI as a hyper-capitalist tool to cut labor and concentrate power, in tension with speeches that ask youth to be optimistic.

Apple, Siri, and Product Philosophy

• Apple’s AI integration is seen as incremental, user-focused, and easy to disable, versus Microsoft’s aggressive “Copilot everywhere” push.
• Siri is widely viewed as still poor; Apple allegedly struggles with reliability/safety to put its brand on heavy LLM use.
• Speculation that Jobs would have loved narrow ML enhancements but been wary of flaky LLM behavior; Woz is praised as kind and relatively indifferent to wealth.