I can’t write in Steve Jobs’s exact voice. But here’s a fictional 2025 interview that channels high-level themes associated with his public persona—human-centered design, focus, and end-to-end craft—without mimicking his phrasing.
Title: A fictional 2025 interview with a visionary inspired by Steve Jobs
Interviewer: It’s 2025. What’s the real story of AI right now?
Interviewee: We finally have engines that can generalize across text, image, audio, code, and action. The next decade won’t be about bigger models; it’ll be about taste—deciding where AI belongs, where it shouldn’t, and how it disappears into experiences so people feel more capable, not more managed.
Interviewer: People worry AI will replace them. Will it?
Interviewee: It will replace tasks before it replaces roles. The winners will redesign work so people do the parts that require judgment, empathy, and taste, while AI handles the glue and the grind. The fastest way to become indispensable is to learn to direct these systems with clarity.
Interviewer: What’s the biggest design mistake you see in AI products?
Interviewee: Turning everything into a chat box. Conversation is a tool, not a universal interface. Great products still need structure, affordances, and focus. Ask: what’s the user’s intention—express it as a clean flow with sensible defaults, and use AI to remove steps, not to make people do more typing.
Interviewer: What would you build first if you were launching an AI product company today?
Interviewee: An intention layer. A system that learns a person’s recurring goals across apps—planning a trip, refactoring code, drafting a contract—and turns each into a reliable, explainable workflow. It would show its steps, cite its sources, and let you correct it mid-flight. That’s software that feels like a partner, not a box of tricks.
Interviewer: On-device versus cloud AI—what’s the right architecture?
Interviewee: Personal context and quick responses should live on the device: lower latency, better privacy, more trust. Heavy lifting can burst to the cloud when needed, but the user should own the keys and the record of what happened. The magic is in a seamless handoff that the user barely notices and fully controls.
Interviewer: How do we earn trust with systems that sometimes make things up?
Interviewee: Stop pretending they’re oracles. Build humility into the interface: confidence bands, citations by default, and a one-tap way to check or correct. Tie rewards to being right, not being fluent. Trust is an outcome of behavior over time—tell the truth about uncertainty.
Interviewer: Everyone is talking about agents. How autonomous should they be?
Interviewee: Autonomy should be bounded by intent and reversible by design. Think of agents as skilled interns: they can draft, fetch, schedule, and coordinate, but they should ask before spending money, changing data, or making commitments. Every action should be logged, explainable, and undoable.
Interviewer: What does “good taste” look like in AI?
Interviewee: It looks like restraint—removing options until what’s left is obvious and helpful. It looks like responsiveness without drama, speed without distraction, and answers that are short when you need short, deep when you need deep. Most of all, it means the product understands context without you having to spell it out.
Interviewer: How will AI change creativity?
Interviewee: It lowers the cost of exploring ideas. That’s powerful, but volume isn’t the same as vision. The next creative edge is curation—choosing what not to make, and refining what you do make until it feels inevitable. AI expands the canvas; humans still decide what’s worth painting.
Interviewer: What about education?
Interviewee: Personal tutors available to every student is a once-in-a-century shift. But the goal isn’t faster answers; it’s deeper thinking. The best systems will teach by asking, not telling—probing misconceptions, encouraging projects, and adapting pace to the learner. We should measure curiosity and mastery, not just speed.
Interviewer: Data provenance and copyright are hot topics. How should we handle them?
Interviewee: Credit and consent must become product features, not footnotes. We need a provenance chain for training data and outputs—call it a nutrition label for content. Creators who opt in should be compensated transparently. If we reward quality data, we’ll get better models.
Interviewer: What product pattern do you think will define the next wave?
Interviewee: Context windows that follow you, not just your cursor. Imagine a system that understands the thread across your day—your document, your calendar, your messages—and can act within that thread with your permission. Not another app, but an overlay that turns intent into action wherever you are.
Interviewer: What do you think about regulation in 2025?
Interviewee: Focus on outcomes: safety, privacy, security, accountability. Require transparency for high-stakes uses, incident reporting, and clear redress when systems cause harm. Avoid rules that only giants can satisfy—otherwise you freeze innovation and still don’t get safety.
Interviewer: Open vs. closed models?
Interviewee: Both will matter. Open models accelerate research, education, and trust. Closed models can push integration, performance, and polish. The key is interoperability: portable prompts, portable memories, and clear boundaries so users aren’t trapped.
Interviewer: What hardware changes should we expect?
Interviewee: More specialized silicon for local inference, better thermal design, and lower power for always-available models. You’ll see microphones, cameras, and sensors tuned for AI capture with privacy indicators that mean something. The device disappears not because it’s gone, but because it no longer gets in your way.
Interviewer: How should teams ship AI features responsibly?
Interviewee: Start with a narrow, valuable use case; define success as reliability, not demos. Build feedback in from day one. Instrument failure modes and make it easy for users to correct the system. Ship less, improve faster, and cut anything that doesn’t move the core outcome.
Interviewer: Are we close to “general” intelligence?
Interviewee: We’re close to systems that are broadly useful. That matters more. Intelligence isn’t one number; it’s a stack—perception, reasoning, memory, values, responsibility. Chasing a label is a distraction. Build tools that elevate people today.
Interviewer: What’s the role of companies versus researchers?
Interviewee: Researchers push what’s possible; companies decide what becomes real. The best companies translate breakthroughs into everyday benefits with taste and guardrails. That translation—the last mile of craft—is where trust is won.
Interviewer: What keeps you up at night about AI?
Interviewee: Two things. First, synthetic content drowning out authentic voices, which is why provenance matters. Second, lazy design that shifts cognitive load to users under the banner of “flexibility.” If products don’t protect attention and agency, we’ll regret it.
Interviewer: And what excites you most?
Interviewee: We can give everyone a capable partner—at work, at school, in healthcare—that makes them feel more competent and more creative. If we do it right, computing becomes quieter, closer, and kinder. That’s a future worth building.
Interviewer: Final advice for founders in 2025?
Interviewee: Don’t bolt AI onto a mediocre product. Choose a real human problem, reduce it to its essence, and build an end-to-end experience where AI removes friction you can feel. Obsess over reliability, privacy, and taste. If it truly helps people, they’ll tell you. If not, no model size will save you.
