LLMs: A Lesson from Steve Jobs

You may ask what I think a man who died before LLMs arrived has to teach us about them. From a product-design viewpoint, I would answer—everything.

In the late 1970s and early 80s, some people had personal computers. There was a lot of noise about the really important stuff, like processor and memory specs, but actual use-cases outside of the hobby and academic arenas were few. Some were just painful, my fave being the bit about how in the World of Tomorrow, when a family had a computer in the house, “Mom can keep recipes on it.” Imbecilic, yet condescending; good job, dudes. Hey, it was my teens, snark was built in.

Then Apple, under Jobs, rolled out the Macintosh. Instead of trying to build the most awesome high-spec personal computer of the 80s, they thought about what would get actual people to put a computer on their desk.?

As it turned out, that was a well-thought-out interface, plus a suite of useful applications, despite the small monochrome display and a sorta-OK chipset. No booting into a C> command environment. No registry fiddling. Some people didn’t even consider Macs computers, since using them was too easy.

Right now, in the LLM world, there’s plenty of shouting about The Coming Thing, with a surplus of specs-based technobabble, but not many “I need one by next week” applications.??

And there is the lesson that Steve Jobs has for the LLM world. Make the thing people want before they know what it is. Don’t tell us about the World of Tomorrow: do the design thinking and show it to us.