Steve Jobs Predicted ChatGPT-Like Tools Several Decades Before They Were Available

A new video circulating on social media shows then Apple-CEO Steve Jobs, who died in 2011, predicting the advent of a ChatGPT tool more than three decades before the first generative tool was introduced in November 2022.

Jobs is seen in a video which is said to be from 1985. In it, he can be heard saying that he hoped an interactive tool could be made in his lifetime.

Jobs laments in the video that he could not ask Aristotle a question. “I mean, I can’t…I don’t get an answer. And so my hope is that in our lifetimes, we can make a tool of a new kind of an interactive time.”

During the video speech, he said: “We are now entering another revolution of free energy. Macintosh (Mac computer) uses less power than a few of those light bulbs, and yet can save us a few hours a day or give us a whole new experience. And it’s free intellectual energy. It’s crude, very crude, but it’s getting more refined year after year after year, and in our lifetimes, it should get very refined. 

“And so my hope is someday when the next Aristotle is alive, we can capture the underlying worldview of that Aristotle, in a computer, and someday some students will be able to not only read the words Aristotle wrote, but ask Aristotle a question and get an answer. And that’s what I hope that we can do. So this is the beginning.”