Steve Wozniak, the man who co-founded Apple alongside Steve Jobs, took a jab at Tesla and its self-driving claims during a recent interview on CNN’s This Morning.
Speaking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in general, after the so-called ‘Godfather of AI’ quit Google a few days ago, Wozniak answered a question about Elon Musk and Tesla, saying that he paid a lot of money to the American EV maker for claims that didn’t hold up.
“I believed the things he said, that a car would drive itself across the country by the end of 2016,” Steve Wozniak said during the segment. “Oh, I had to upgrade to that model! And then, it wouldn’t do anything, I could tell it would never make it across the country. And he said: here, we have a new one with eight cameras and it will make it across the country by the end of 2017,” he added.
Apple’s co-founder added that he actually believed those things, but that it’s actually “not even close to reality.”
However, the biggest shot at Tesla’s self-driving claims came a few seconds after, with Wozniak saying:
“And boy, if you want a study of AI gone wrong and taking a lot of claims and trying to kill you every chance it can - get a Tesla.” This prompted laughs in the studio, with one of the hosts simply replying with a short “Wow!”
During the same segment, Steve Jobs’ former business partner revealed that he never actually met Elon Musk but that he admires some of the things Tesla’s CEO has done for the world, such as pushing consumers toward electric vehicles. But in Wozniak’s opinion, this gets overshadowed by the multiple occasions where Musk and Tesla have been accused of overstating the capabilities of the driver assistance systems installed in the company’s models.
In the past, the famed Apple engineer went on record saying that Tesla’s so-called Autopilot is “deceiving” and “dangerous.”