Reid riffs on Signal, AI for cancer detection, and GPT-4o image generation

In the wake of Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s accidental inclusion in senior government officials’ Signal group chat discussing war plans, Reid weighs in on how the U. S. government should—and shouldn’t—use encrypted messaging apps. He and Aria also discuss AI-powered breakthroughs in cancer detection and medical diagnostics, along with NVIDIA’s newly announced Superchip and OpenAI’s latest image generation capabilities. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Reid Hoffman?

  I'm Reid Hoffman.

• 0:02Aria Finger?

  And I'm Aria Finkler.

• 0:04Reid Hoffman?

  We want to know what happens if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way.

• 0:09Aria Finger?

  Typically, we ask our guests for their outlook on the best possible future. But now, every other week, I get to ask Reid for his take.

• 0:18Reid Hoffman?

  This is possible.

• 0:23Aria Finger?

  Anyone who's been paying attention to the news has seen the explosive story from Jeffrey Goldberg from The Atlantic about the Signal group chat that discussed the bombings of Yemen. And so there are so many questions related to national security, data privacy, data security, having records that will disappear after a week. And so I think there's two separate things here. One is sort of more on the government side, and the other is just sort of the future of digital technologies. When we get back to the issue at hand for the government, like, do you think the government should be using Signal chats to communicate? Because it is a method that can be either easily hacked, you invite someone accidentally, the records aren't capped, like, where do you see that line?

• 1:03Reid Hoffman?

  I actually think, generally speaking, using Signal is good. Part of the choice of it is it's one of the most safe and secure and independent encrypted apps. And unlike a lot of technology, which government tends to try to RFP, it's live and constant and upgrading. And so, you know, it's safe and secure from, you know, for example, Russian hacking. Now, Signal is designed for individuals, not for groups. So it doesn't have all the features like a Microsoft Teams that have, which is, you know, making sure that anyone you're including is in your organization, et cetera. Because, you know, Signal is that freedom of the individual, in a way. So it doesn't stop you from doing what I presume is user error, and including the editor in chief of a prominent magazine, on your thread

• 1:48Reid Hoffman?

  where you're detailing your war plans and perhaps even most comedically saying, I know, OPSEC is good. You're like, Operation OPSEC, for people who don't know, is operational security, which means you're protecting yourself from intrusion and spying. Actually, you've invited the journalist in. And, you know, so that's just more, you know, Department of Government incompetence kind of activity. But I actually think, generally speaking, using Signal is good. It just will take, you know, people who are not being incompetent.

• 2:17Aria Finger?

  Right. So let's talk about another sort of technology story that's been in the news. There's been a lot of buzz recently because a London National Health Service Hospital, they claim to be the first in the world to use AI to perform instant skin cancer checks. And so they fed photos of moles into their app and the hospital had a 75% reduction in clinical time and they still had a near perfect diagnostic record. I mean, this is sort of the future of medicine that we're so excited about. What do you think are going to be the biggest barriers to leveraging AI as a diagnostic tool? Like, we have this amazing story. How do we scale this?

• 2:54Reid Hoffman?

  So, I mean, just even to elaborate that story, I mean, imagine all this stuff is coming to a smartphone near you, that the camera will be used for this. And there already is apps and applications for doing parts of that. And I think that part of where we will see an amazing revolution in human health and the elevation of humanity. And so I think that's a whole range of things that are there that are, for example, advice from, you know, Pi or ChatGPT or Copilot, you know, Gemini to you to doctor amplification, you know, today, if you had a, an AI or a radiologist reading your film, you'd rather have both. And then, you know, this app, which is, you know, running on an iPhone can bring all kinds of diagnostics.

• 3:37Reid Hoffman?

  I mean, just think of us, okay, that mole particular characteristic, but also mention rashes or, you know, or skin tone, you know, you can imagine the sensors where we begin to go, like, here's your breathe on it sensor is most medical conditions, cancer is an obvious example of it. But the earlier that you get to it, the earlier that you understand it and can do something about it, the much better your health outcomes are. And so just imagine all of that being brought to you by AI. And then, of course, the moon shots of like curing cancer, therapeutics. And obviously, Manus, which I'm doing the Sutar to Mukherjee, you know, our moonshot target, part of that video we did is like, in addition to like sending mend the moon, we can tackle big things like cancer.

• 4:22Reid Hoffman?

  I think this is small end years by which we start getting more and more amazing results.

• 4:28Aria Finger?

  Yeah, I have to admit, I'm really bullish on the technology. Thing I do worry about is, I don't want to say government getting in the way, but like I was at a GP appointment last week and I got a notice and it said, hey, your doctor wants to record the visit. They're going to feed the data into Microsoft and use Microsoft Azure and Copilot and we're going to improve health outcomes. I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. I'm so excited. And then the next line was something like, oh, by the way, if you sign this, HIPAA no longer applies to you and you don't own your data and it could go anywhere. And I was like, oh, okay. It seems like we need a new regulatory framework, which is something between I want my data protected

• 5:08Aria Finger?

  and you can use the data and perhaps, you know, our, our political system is going to have to catch up. Do you think that's going to be a barrier in the US and UK?

• 5:16Reid Hoffman?

  A thousand percent because most people imagine the unknown fears of what happens with the data more than what they get as collective benefit, whereas the collective benefit is massive and the unknown fears are rare.

• 5:29Aria Finger?

  Mm hmm. Yep.

• 5:30Reid Hoffman?

  So actually, in fact, everyone, which I presume you did, should actually sigh that kind of thing. Because like, for example, whether it's cancer or anything else, we're going to get a massive benefit from the collective. Now, what the regulation needs to be is not, you can't use the data. The regulation has to be that you have to do appropriate care to keep, you know, Aria's safety and sanctity, you know, kind of healthy, where it can't bleed out information to other places, where she might get discriminated against in her workplace. Think about how much we could accelerate everybody's health inquiry. If we could just take all of current health data and upload it all and just use it right now. We would be so much better off, all of us. And the only thing that really stops it, in addition to just general

• 6:14Reid Hoffman?

  regulation, is like, there are some areas where you say, okay, we have to think through and make sure that we don't do damage to individuals as we do this. But I think that's actually relatively straightforward. I mean, like, for example, I would have no worries, not just because I'm on the Microsoft board, but I would have no worries about signing that because I know that all of these major players treat the data stuff very, very seriously indeed. And so, like, I got asked this question. At a couple of events when I was doing the super agency book tour in London was that, well, should I trust the data that I'm putting into chat GPT or Gemini or Claude? Or and the answer is, most of the time you do a paid account, you have a contract and it's managed

• 6:53Reid Hoffman?

  and safe and all the rest. But it's also these companies know that their ongoing value is by maintaining brand safety with you. They have a massive economic incentive for that. So it doesn't mean that they can't fuck up, just like anything can fuck up. Your doctor can fuck up, you know, but they have a massive incentive for that. And so I think generally speaking, we want to go very fast down this path and we but we do want to, you know, have like watch for specific considerations. And that's, as you know, the entire super agency thing.

• 7:24Aria Finger?

  Absolutely. All right. So switching gears a little bit, thinking about no matter what the new technology is or what the new thing VCs are investing in, you're always going to have some people saying it's a bubble and some people saying it's amazing. So recently Alibaba chairman Joe Say, he said, I'm still astounded by the type of numbers that are being thrown around in the US about investing in AI. People are taking, literally talking about $500 billion. And I don't think that's entirely necessary. I think in a way, people are investing ahead of the demand that they're seeing today, but that they're projecting much bigger demand that ostensibly isn't here yet. And then on the other side, you have, you know, the Nvidia CEO Jensen

• 8:04Aria Finger?

  Huang, and he just announced a new chip, the forthcoming Ruben GPU, and it offers 3.3 times more power than its predecessor. And so he is predicting an inflection point where the world would see an 100 fold increase in computing demand due to the advancements in agentic AI systems. I don't necessarily think those are in conflict. It's sort of when the demand will come. But where do you stand on this in terms of, are we going to be using this forthcoming, you know, compute that's coming from these chips? Or is the demand just not there yet?

• 8:38Reid Hoffman?

  Well, obviously, I would have been voting wrong on the Microsoft board if I was not voting for that there will be massive demand. Now, part of the whole question of navigating this is you can be a little wrong. You don't want to be massively wrong projecting demand because otherwise it can be very expensive, miss a cycle. So roughly speaking, you want to be potentially months wrong, not years wrong. So like if you're 10 months wrong, no problem. 10 years wrong, big problem. But I think that because you look at this and you say, hey, if you can actually add intelligence, like we were just talking about, you can add intelligence to research and analysis, you can add intelligence to navigation, you can add intelligence to education, you can add intelligence to navigating legal things, you

• 9:22Reid Hoffman?

  can add intelligence to like literally everything, then the presumption is, which I think is very smart, is that we have the same kind of market demand for it that we do for electricity. At a certain price, we have infinite demand for it. Yep. Right. And it's just like, for example, as electricity maintains cheap or anything else, we do more air conditioning, we do more heating, we do more, like all these other things. And that's part of the reason why it's very important that the energy be green, because, and we want to factor that in to getting the energy price. But like with green energy, make it as cheap as possible, because there's infinite demand for it. And I think that same infinite demand is going to apply to intelligence. So as you said, they can

• 10:03Reid Hoffman?

  both be right. But I would be betting the way the US tech sector is betting, which is, this is going to be massively important. And getting there early and iterating really, really matters. The notion is, we're first in a very slow thing, because actually, AI adoption right now is slow. Part of what I'm trying to do in Super Agency, this podcast, is get that to be faster, because I think that's useful in shaping it. You know, humanity enters a chat, you know, chapter one of Super Agency. And I think that's the thing we want to get to. But I think once it starts going fast, it'll also go fast. So it's kind of slow, then fast. And part of what will trigger, like, well, when fast and how, will be competitive things.

• 10:46Reid Hoffman?

  So like if you're an engineer and you look over your shoulder and your fellow engineer, she's using Copilot to suddenly code a whole lot faster and better, you go, oh shit, I should do that too. And then that's just individuals, then groups and groups within companies and then not just, you know, groups within companies, companies between companies and then industries and individuals. It's like the, hey, I made a great thing for my dinner party because I consulted ChatGPT on my recipe. And so anyway, that's the acceleration that we will see very, very soon.

• 11:15Aria Finger?

  And there has been some demand. I mean, a hundred million people are using ChatGPT, Anthropic. They do have billions of dollars in revenue. So, you know, there will be companies that fail. They're always have. That's actually the great thing about, you know, technology and VC and companies is there's a lot of people trying things and it's going to be really exciting to see what's successful. And what we're seeing right now is really an explosion in image generation. I mean, our internal Slack channel has just been, you know, popcorning with new images, new pictures of San Francisco. There is so much excitement coming because of the new launch from OpenAI. And, you know, Sam Altman just posted a quote, "We think people will love it and we're excited to see the resulting

• 11:57Aria Finger?

  creativity." Why are hyperscalers sprinting so hard on image generation in particular?

• 12:04Reid Hoffman?

  Well, they're sprinting on a lot of things. I think image generation just happens to be a particular highlight of this month. And it will be a highlight of future months and it was a highlight of past months, but it's like, you know, this month, image generation, next month, chain of thought reasoning, month after that, coding, maybe for two months for that.

• 12:20Aria Finger?

  Do you think it's just fun? Like, do you think one of the reasons is because people just like making pictures?

• 12:25Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, well, you know, pictures worth a thousand words. And so, you know, you kind of get to the, hey, I can, I can do deep research, but I can also create a picture. And, and, you know, I think it's also when, you know, with technologists, when they get a lot of feedback, like for example, I think part of the update was, boy, it puts words very poorly in pictures, which, you know, you and I've experienced because we've tried to create images that would be, mean something for people and then put words in it because we are linguistic creatures and the words come out of.

• 12:52Aria Finger?

  Not great thus far.

• 12:53Reid Hoffman?

  Not great thus far. You know, part of what I think we'll see because of AI is a revolution in communication and images. Not just in the words, but how do I use an image? It could be a picture to actually, in fact, help amplify and understand this point in efficient, emotive, connective, and a way. And I think we're going to see a lot more of that. And I think that's, again, it's all of these areas in amplifying our expression and our speech for this.

• 13:18Aria Finger?

  I love it. Reid, thank you so much. Always a joy to chat.

• 13:21Reid Hoffman?

  Always a joy.

• 13:26Reid Hoffman?

  Possible is produced by Wondery Media Network. It's hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sarah Schlied, Vanessa Handy, Aliyah Yates, Paloma Moreno Jimenez, and Malia Agudelo. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.

• 13:48Aria Finger?

  Special thanks to Surya Yalimanchili, Sayida Sepieva, Thanasi Dilos, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patel, and Ben Relis.