What just happened? For the third time in a few weeks, someone has mentioned AI at university graduation speech. But rather than being drowned out by boos, the speaker received cheers. That's because it was AI skeptic Steve Wozniak, and he was talking about "actual intelligence."
Apple co-founder Wozniak, perhaps the best-loved personality in the tech industry, spoke at Grand Valley State University's graduation ceremony earlier this month.
The Woz brought up the subject of AI, something that concerns many of today's graduates who fear its negative impact on their job prospects.
"You have AI – actual intelligence," Wozniak said, eliciting a round of applause from the audience.
"It would take too long to go deeply into what I think about AI, but we've been trying to create a brain," Wozniak said. "Is there a way we can duplicate a routine a trillion times and have it work like a brain? AI is one of those attempts."
"I was at a company where the engineers figured out how to make a brain," he continued, adding that it "takes nine months."
Unlike most tech luminaries and executives, Wozniak doesn't view AI with slavish adoration. He said in a March interview with CNN that he doesn't use the technology very much, and when he does, he's "disappointed a lot."
Wozniak complained that AI often didn't generate the specific information he was looking for, and the text it comes up with is too dry and too perfect.
The reaction to Wozniak's remarks was a stark contrast to two recent university graduation speeches in which AI was mentioned. The most recent was by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who spoke about the amazing abilities of agentic AI and warned those refusing to use the technology that they'd be left behind. Unsurprisingly, this was greeted with a cacophony of boos that seemed to visibly irate Schmidt, which made things worse.
Before Schmidt decided to praise AI in a room full of people who may struggle to find work because of it, Gloria Caulfield, VP of strategic alliances at Tavistock Group, did the same thing at UCF's College of Arts and Humanities and the Nicholson School of Communication and Media. She called it "the next industrial revolution," before describing the barrage of anger directed toward her as "passion."
Moving away from AI, Wozniak gave students some advice for their chosen career paths by paraphrasing Apple's famous 1997 advertising slogan and philosophy.
"You should always try to think different," he said. "Don't follow the same steps as a million other people. Think, is there something I can do a little different?"