Realistic AI Interview

Interviewer: Steve, it’s 2025. AI has accelerated dramatically. If you were leading a product team today, what would your philosophy be?

Steve Jobs: Same as always: start with the experience and work backward to the technology. Most AI right now is a demo in search of a product. The winners will make AI vanish into the experience, not shove it in your face. Make it useful, make it humane, make it obvious—so obvious it feels inevitable.

Interviewer: What does “humane AI” mean to you?

Steve Jobs: It means the product respects your time, your attention, and your intent. It doesn’t distract, it doesn’t manipulate, and it doesn’t make you feel stupid. AI should reduce cognitive load—remove friction—so people can be more creative, not less. It should say “I’ve got this,” then get out of the way.

Interviewer: Where do you see the biggest near-term impact?

Steve Jobs: Three places. First, interfaces: conversational, multimodal, anticipatory. Your devices will know the context—what you’re doing, where you are, what you mean—and offer the right thing at the right time. Second, creation: turning ideas into artifacts, fast—code, video, music, presentations—without 20 tools and a manual. Third, personal computing becoming truly personal: your AI will understand you, not just users like you.

Interviewer: And the biggest risk?

Steve Jobs: Sloppiness. Shipping half-baked “AI features” because they demo well. If the model hallucinates, you own it. If it invades privacy, you own it. If it wastes time, you own it. Trust is the product. Lose that, you’re done.

Interviewer: How should companies think about data and privacy in AI?

Steve Jobs: Privacy is a feature, not a checkbox. Do as much on-device as possible. Minimize data collection. Be explicit and reversible with consent. Your AI should be yours—your model, your memory, your boundaries. People aren’t the product; they’re the customer. Treat them that way.

Interviewer: What about regulation?

Steve Jobs: Some guardrails are necessary—safety, transparency, accountability. But don’t let regulation become a fig leaf for bad design. Build things that would be okay even if a New York Times headline explained exactly how they work. That’s a good litmus test.

Interviewer: What’s overhyped?

Steve Jobs: General intelligence timelines and “AI will replace all jobs” talk. It makes headlines. In the meantime, there’s a trillion dollars of value in making everyday tools smarter and kinder. Focus there.

Interviewer: What’s underhyped?

Steve Jobs: AI as a collaborator with taste. Models are getting good at structure—summaries, outlines, drafts. The leap is taste: good defaults, good constraints, good curation. Help people make better choices with less effort. Taste at scale—that’s power.

Interviewer: How do you design products around AI without making them feel like magic tricks?

Steve Jobs: Teach the user the model’s mental model. Show confidence levels. Offer quick ways to correct. Let people peek under the hood just enough to build trust. And keep your promises small and reliable. A humble tool you can trust beats a flashy one you can’t.

Interviewer: Will we still have “apps” in five years?

Steve Jobs: Fewer. The boundaries will blur. Think capabilities instead of apps—composable tools orchestrated by context and intent. The interface becomes a canvas where you express what you want, and the system assembles the workflow. Apps become modules.

Interviewer: What’s the role of hardware?

Steve Jobs: Still essential. Hardware sets the constraints that make software great. Sensors, battery, thermals, dedicated AI silicon—these shape what’s possible on-device. The best products marry custom silicon, tight software integration, and a ruthless focus on latency and reliability. If it lags, it’s dead.

Interviewer: How should teams ship AI responsibly?

Steve Jobs: Ship in concentric circles: start small, learn fast, expand carefully. Instrument everything. Build red teams inside your product team. Make it easy to report issues. And have the courage to kill features that don’t meet the bar, no matter how shiny they are.

Interviewer: Advice for creators worried AI will replace them?

Steve Jobs: Tools don’t replace creators. Bad tools replace mediocre creators. Great tools empower great creators to go further. Lean into your taste and your voice. Use AI to remove the scaffolding so you can spend more time on what only you can do.

Interviewer: What do you want AI to do for people at a human level?

Steve Jobs: Give them back their time. Reduce the junk work that numbs us. Help them learn faster. Help them express themselves. And help them connect—really connect—with other people. Technology should amplify our humanity, not compete with it.

Interviewer: If you had to pick one North Star metric for an AI product?

Steve Jobs: Time well spent. Not minutes used—outcomes achieved with confidence and delight. If people finish their work faster and feel better about it, you’re on the right track.

Interviewer: Final thought?

Steve Jobs: Don’t chase AI. Chase clarity. If you make something truly clear and truly useful, the AI is just the means. The product is the feeling people have when they use it. Build for that.