Reid Hoffman: Why The AI Investment Will Pay Off

Reid Hoffman is the co-founder of LinkedIn, a legendary Silicon Valley investor, and author of the new book Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future. Hoffman joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss his optimistic case for AI, the massive investments flooding into the field, and whether they can possibly pay off. Tune in to hear Hoffman's insider perspective on OpenAI's $6.6 billion raise, the emergence of Chinese AI competitor DeepSeek, and why he believes these unprecedented investments will seem small in retrospect. We also cover the evolving Microsoft-OpenAI relationship, tech CEOs gravitating toward Trump, and Hoffman's views on AI regulation and TikTok's future. Hit play for a deep dive into AI's trajectory from one of the industry's most influential voices. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack? Here’s 40% off for the first year: https://tinyurl.com/bigtechnology Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Reid Hoffman is here to talk about the promise and the business of AI. We'll be back with the legendary investor and entrepreneur right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put agentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial to go inside a large scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today.

• 0:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razor were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. LinkedIn founder, investor, and author Reid Hoffman is here to talk with us about the state of AI and his new book, Super Agency: What Could Possibly Go Right With Our AI Future?

• 1:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Reid, been looking forward to speaking with you for a long time and great to finally get a chance to do it. Welcome to the show.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 1:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Definitely. I have a copy of the book with me now. This is the galley, the preview, and I think the book that debuts will look a little different, kind of cooler. I know you're doing some custom covers. We can talk about that. And the book is all about artificial intelligence, your belief in the promise of AI. I love the "What Could Go Right?" subtitle. And, you know, I think that a lot of Silicon Valley is asking what could go right? And they have to find things that go right because... If you think about the way that these companies have been invested in, it's wild. And maybe it's like the true Silicon Valley story where you're going to lose a lot of money and then hope that you'll make some money on the other side. But Silicon Valley has never done it like this. And you know,

• 2:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  there's no, no one that knows it better than you in terms of the way that these works, the investing and the entrepreneurship side. Just a few numbers. OpenAI raised the largest VC round in history last year, 6.6 billion. Anthropic raised 4 billion and is on track to raise another 2 billion. Elon Musk has raised billions, you know, in his own right. Nvidia, 3 plus trillion dollar market cap. Don't these investments have to pay off in a way that is going to be difficult for the math to work out?

• 2:51Speaker 01

  I actually think that those investments will actually in fact be pretty straightforward. It's not to say that there won't be, just like the kind of early internet and others, there won't be a bunch of crazy investments that, you know, will essentially not make money. But when you think about what AI is going to bring to the transformation of human life and human work, the investments will, I think, seem small in retrospect. And obviously, that seems crazy from a viewpoint when you're saying billions of dollars in venture capital. But actually, when you think about kind of like, when every single thing that has a compute unit in it,

• 3:36Speaker 01

  and it's not just phones and computers, which will be huge, but you know, speakers and lights and thermostats and cars and, you know, planes, trains and automobiles, everything is going to get smarter. And as part of that, you know, kind of intelligence adds a huge amount of value, a huge amount of efficiency. And so the question really isn't if it will pay out, you know, majorly, which I think it will, but which investments and over what timeframe? Because those have some, some, some variable, but you know, part of what I encourage people, part of the reason why, you know, wrote Super Agency.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  Is anyone who's not actually engaged in using AI today and not just for, hey, I opened my refrigerator, I have a set of ingredients, what should I make for dinner? That's a fun use case, easy. Or a sonnet for my friend's, you know, birthday party or whatever else. That's fun. But for serious things, for, for important things that range from like, oh, I've got this health concern I want to talk about personally to, um, hey, I'm trying to do this kind of work, um, and you know, how does it help me with that work? And I think already today, if you play with, you know, GBD four, Copilot, Sonnet, other things, you will find that it can add real value today.

• 4:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Look, I agree with you in all this. And I think the thing that you mentioned that's most important is the timeframe because most VC funds, tell me if I'm wrong, usually try to get a return in seven years. And if you think about OpenAI, right? Let's just take that as an example. You were an early investor in OpenAI. It's been a while at this point already, but even the most recent rounds, 6.6 billion, um, you know, in, in seven years, you want to be able to return 10x on, on that money. So 60 billion and they're losing a lot of money. They lost 5 billion last year, according to reports. So how does the math work?

• 5:37Speaker 01

  So all venture as venture rounds work, you know, start with the company like frequently in series A, series Bs, there's zero revenue, right? So, so they're always losing money and it's kind of the curve of the expectation of revenue, you know, kind of compounding over the cost curve. And so that's just business as usual. Now it's a higher scale with OpenAI with, you know, kind of having, uh, you know, kind of a, uh, you know, both, you know, a massive footprint already, a massive kind of leadership position and, um, you know, kind of, you know, revenue that, that you're expecting to grow in the substantive frame. But this is actually one of the reasons why Silicon Valley tends to create.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  So many of the technology companies that dominate the globe, because if you take an overly kind of classic DCF analysis, business school prof analysis, et cetera, which many, much of the world does in investing and doesn't say, no, actually, in fact, it's a feature that you're investing massively on something that at the moment looks, you know, like today's eye banking analysis is not particularly good, but two, three, five, seven, and by the way, venture investments can go up to 10, you know, kind of years. And plus, if it's, if it's compounding and growing the right way, can be, you know, kind of just epic investments. And it isn't just AI things. I mean, this is part of like, you know, Greylock, you know, investment in Airbnb, which I led the series A of,

• 7:05Speaker 01

  had that similar characteristics of just bleeding money and then later being the amazing business we see today. And that's, that, that judgment call on a risk discounted basis is part of what you're doing. And, you know, the, the, the investment that investors made last year is kind of more of a growth venture round relative to, it doesn't necessarily require a 10x. I mean, you know, we have trillion dollar companies now. So, you know, trillion dollar companies are definitely within, you know, feasibility, but it doesn't require a trillion dollar company to make real money because part of what happens, 10x is when you expect zero as a possibility. Lower multiples are fine when you know that you already have a baseline massive value that you're building on top of.

• 7:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  But there's still questions about the ROI here. So basically, if the ROI doesn't come through, I think you believe it will. But if it doesn't, that could be a real problem. Again, it's talking about the size. Don't you think that that has some blowback? And it's interesting to me, one more thing about that. A lot of the big traditional VCs did not participate in the most recent rounds. I don't know if Grey like it. I know Andreessen Horowitz, I think, sat out after evaluating. And then you saw Josh Kushner's fund really led open the OpenAI round, but the traditional names in the valley were not involved.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Well, there's kind of different risk profiles and different, you know, games. Like, for example, in Valley history, DST led around in Facebook when the traditional funds were all like, oh, we'll only do a three to five billion pre, you know, with lots of caveats and everything else. And DST came in and said, we'll do a 10 billion post and no caveats. And it was an epic investment for DST and Facebook, right? Just like literally, you know, like blazing amounts of money and establishment of a position. And so sometimes when the traditional VCs go, hey, we're only early stage, or we'll only do this, like

• 9:02Speaker 01

  new firms come in and show that through a smart bet can make a ton of money. And so that is also a historical Silicon Valley position. And, you know, I think that the questions around, you know, you say, well, when can you invest billion dollars as a venture firm? And the answer is, look, you're trying to hit a return multiple, but it's much easier when you know, when you believe with some vigor and evidence that your chance of going below 1X is very, very small. And, you know, when you look at OpenAI's position, you go, well, actually, in fact, is my position guaranteed on the downside seems, you know,

• 9:44Speaker 01

  like a good bet? And then do I believe in compounding with a risk discount that I can make a multiple on the upside? That's when, you know, investors make money. And part of venture is there's, you know, it's traditional and a lot of venture investments that, you know, firm X goes, I'm gonna, I'm gonna bet on company A, when firms Y and Z go, oh, that's nutty. And sometimes, you know, firm X is right, and sometimes they're not. I mean, this is, you know, whether it's, you know, like for example, speaking for Greylock, you know, when Greylock invested at Facebook at a 500 million pre-money valuation, literally

• 10:23Speaker 01

  all of the companion VC firms were, oh, that's crazy, this college website, Greylock's demonstrating that it's past, past time, et cetera, et cetera. That's how you make potential, and they're risky, of course, but that's how you make epic investments.

• 10:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  So then, how does this change the AI field? I mean, you're an early investor in OpenAI. The idea was for it to be open. It's not open anymore. I mean, you don't see a lot of open source releases from them. They don't publish as much as they intended to at the beginning. It's kind of a perpetual joke from Elon that they're closed AI. And, you know, this technology that you invested in, I think because you thought it's going to be a fundamental building block of the future for humanity, now has such pressure on it to deliver that profit for the investors that put the money in. So how does that change the field?

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Well, so first, in terms of being open, there's lots of different parameters of open, and OpenAI has been, you know, working to have like open, you know, kind of, you know, with obviously identity and registration for safety, but OpenAI API access. It wasn't called Open Source AI. It was called OpenAI, right? Or Open Model AI wasn't called that either. And so the question is, is the parameters of open, and sure, people would say, well, I think what you should be open is all your meetings should be Zoom broadcast to the world. And that's what I think open should be. I mean, it's not an outsider's ability to claim open. It's insiders. And, you know, for, you know, kind of the entertainment, you know, Elon was part of

• 11:55Speaker 01

  that decision for, you know, as, as kind of co-CEO in terms of making that decision. And so that's how OpenAI has always operated. Now, I think that OpenAI continues to stay on its mission, which is, how do we make AGI for the maximum benefit of humanity? And there's various things that it has done for, you know, kind of catalyzing safety practices, catalyzed, you know, kind of knowledge about what kinds of things would be the right kinds of design for bringing it into, you know, kind of everyday usage. And I think part of what OpenAI also led the field in was doing this thing that I call

• 12:37Speaker 01

  in my book, "Super Agency: Iterative Deployment," which is make it available to, you know, hundreds of millions of people around the world so that they can play with it, give feedback. You know, kind of say, hey, these are the things that really work. These things don't work as well and be able to get familiarized and participate in the conversation of it evolving. And I think that is also part of the openness. And so I think that all fits within the OpenAI mission for what they're doing. It doesn't mean that there aren't footfalls, doesn't mean there aren't corrections. You know, in early days, OpenAI was publishing a lot and then went well. From a safety perspective, we think we should slow down publishing some because part of being, you know, for the benefit of humanity is paying a lot of attention to what are

• 13:21Speaker 01

  called alignment issues within AI. And, and OpenAI has continued to be one of the major leaders in that. And so I think it's, you know, I'm still very, I think that OpenAI has, has stayed true to its mission and continues to do so with vigor.

• 13:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  But the, the money does change things and you sort of tend to, tend to see it as a consumer when you're in an app and you're like, oh, they're growth hacking me. And that's because they have to return some value to investors and they need you to get back on the app, either to see an ad or they just want to show Wall Street that their daily active or monthly active user count went up. It changes the product. And so I'm curious what you think all this investment does to the product. Like, do we get a different product because of this need to show returns?

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Well, one of the things, look, there's a kind of a little bit of a trope within a bunch of media that money somehow is, is anti the interest of individuals or anti the interest of society. It's actually how we power everything in society. And so, you know, having-

• 14:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I'm not anti-money.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  No, I get it. I'm just, you know-

• 14:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  I hear what you're saying.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  So money itself is not necessarily a problem. It's a question of how the money plays in. So for example, money playing in as within the, within the kind of functioning of society, products and services, you know, integration in industry, et cetera. Broadly, most of those things are mostly very positive. Now, of course- In a pure mission standpoint, you'd say, hey, we could make our service, you know, kind of free for everybody, and that would be a really great thing. And OpenAI is actually, you know, spending a bunch of money, making it free or subsidized to get the widest possible exposure, engagement in the, and, and learning about these products and being able to use them. You know, a lot of OpenAI products are offered at below what they're cost right now in order

• 15:14Speaker 01

  to do that. But of course, you know, they will, as, as an invested company, need to begin, you know, kind of, you know, over time, showing returns. That means that they need to also focus as intensely on their money-making capabilities as their, you know, engage the world, you know, kind of possibilities. But ultimately, I think, just like many commercial products, that's not antithetical to its mission, because succeeding in raising capital, succeeding in building these products, and succeeding in offering them to the world is part of the, you know, pro-humanity mission. And you, you know, we live in a capital world where these

• 15:55Speaker 01

  things are decided by capital. So I think that's a good thing. Now, might it say, hey, we're going to focus on some real money-making products for enterprise before we get to the mass market, you know, kind of global south, you know, things that are, you know, for, for people who are in, in less wealthy economies? You could have impacts like that. That's a natural part of how the, the capitalist system works. But I know that OpenAI's mission for humanity won't allow it to be, you know, it'll allow it to be strategic, but not distracted from its focus.

• 16:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  So you think that we can still get AI technology that's going to benefit humanity as the North Star, even if there's a imperative to return to investors?

• 16:43Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. And I think that's already what we're seeing in motion right now.

• 16:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, as long as we're talking about OpenAI, I have one more question for you because you are on the Microsoft board and it's been pretty obvious to everybody watching from the sidelines that, you know, there was this really close knit partnership, then some governance weirdness at OpenAI. Sam is fired, Sam comes back, and then next thing you know, Microsoft hires Mustafa Soliman, who you co-founded Inflection with, and it seems like there's some healthy competition, but competition where Microsoft is trying to start to build some of the same products that you might see within OpenAI, maybe insulate itself from some of the risks that, you know, became painfully aware of during the incident with Altman. So what's the status

• 17:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  of that relationship? And can Microsoft and OpenAI still form a strong partnership and still have a tight bond, given all that's transpired and where things seem to be heading?

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Well, I think they're both partnering and competing. And actually, I think that's healthy for both companies and healthy for the ecosystem. So they're partnering because there's a lot of ways in which OpenAI uses Azure infrastructure, which, you know, has been, you know, building, you know, amazing new capabilities through being on this journey with OpenAI. I think that, you know, OpenAI sells things to enterprises and consumers that are, you know, it's like you can pay OpenAI or you can pay Microsoft. And so they have a, there's competing in that. And I think that's healthy for the ecosystem and for also both companies. And so, but, you know, they also have ways that, you know, they, by partnering, they also potentially

• 18:29Speaker 01

  both, you know, both get a lot of benefits from that. And so I think it's a, it's a good ecosystem. I think the, I think when the history, the history books are written, I think this will be one of the kind of epic partnerships that, you know, kind of plays out into the field. And, you know, there's now lots of people who, you know, it's, it's a growing number of, of competitors, you know, so not just Google, not just Anthropic, you know, Amazon's beginning to do stuff directly itself as well. There's, you know, DeepSeek and, and others within China. And so the, the competitive sphere, you know, as anticipated is growing.

• 19:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and you're setting me up perfectly for the next question, Reid, so thank you for that, which is, you started off by saying the question really is timeframe and who's going to win. Who do you think's going to win?

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Well, the good news is I think there's going to be multiple winners. And, you know, maybe that, you know, one company wins at one thing, one company wins at another, you know, the incumbents are obviously trying to bring AI into the areas that they have strong positions. So, you know, Microsoft's very focused on AI for the enterprise, Google's very focused on AI for search. And also, that doesn't mean that they're the only thing that any of these companies are doing. You know, part of what I think, you know, OpenAI is doing is saying, hey, we need to have a kind of a third strong position on with kind of an AGI for humanity mission. And so I think there are going to be multiple winners.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  And, you know, I, you know, and Greylock have continued to invest in a variety of startups because we think there's going to be a massive number of startup positions that will be really interesting as well. And so, so I think that the, there's going to be lots of winners. And so, the kind of who's the winner is, I think, actually, in fact, it's like, who's the winner of the internet, right? Well, obviously, Google had a really strong position, as did Amazon, as did Facebook. But there were a bunch of others as well. And so I think that's similar. There's going to be many winners.

• 20:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  But do you think there's room for all these foundational model companies to succeed and pay off? Like, one of my perspectives is that, like, there's going to be some company that's just going to sort of collapse under the weight of what it needs to deliver, whether that's an Anthropic, I don't know, or OpenAI. It just doesn't seem to me like they can all succeed. But maybe I'm wrong. What do you think?

• 21:01Speaker 01

  Well, I do think that there will be efforts at foundational models that won't work. And especially, I think, late entrants. Like, late entrants have a harder, you know, catch-up routine and a lot of kind of expense to go to it, especially given that the early folks like OpenAI have a very broad base, like, to some degree, if you, you ask the average, you know, worker or person in the street, what is, what is AI? They'll say, ChatGPT, right? And so that gives, you know, OpenAI kind of a strong, you know, kind of initial position. But, you know, I think that the later entrance to frontier models as startups may have particular challenges.

• 21:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Does Elon Musk fall into that category? I mean, he's a late entrant with XAI, but he's building a million GPU cluster.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, TBD. Now, it's a huge expense line, you know, prior to kind of a revenue position. But, you know, that, as we talked about earlier, can be a classic Silicon Valley position. So I think it's a, he's a, he's a, you know, the, the, the Grok and XAI is a later entrant. But, you know, obviously a very capable player.

• 22:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. Let's just talk quickly about DeepSeek since you brought it up. It's one of those things that no one saw coming, at least in the US. And now, if I talk about AI and I don't mention DeepSeek, I get a lot of comments. It seems to indicate to me that China, so for folks who are listening who don't know about it, it is a large language model out of China, according to its own benchmarks. So take this with, you know, for what it's worth. It outperforms Meta's Llama 3.1 and OpenAI's GPT-4O. It seems like China's in the game. Do you agree?

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It was one of the conversations that I'd frequently have the last couple of years where they'd say, "Oh, you're just bringing up China competition as kind of the bugbear." We're like, "No, no, you know, part of my job as an investor, as an entrepreneur, as a theorist, is to predict where the puck is moving to." And the Chinese are strong and vigorous. There's lots of very capable, very hardworking entrepreneurial folks with technological depth. And so it doesn't surprise me that DeepSeek has, has, has entered the field with, with vigor. And I think that, you know, part of when you look at, you know, what is going to be playing out with AI,

• 23:30Speaker 01

  China and multiple companies within it, because, you know, I haven't evaluated yet Minimax, which also just came out recently, but will have a number of very strong contenders for this in the, the world technology landscape. And so I think it's a, you know, the, the game is on, or game is afoot, if we want to be Sherlock Holmes.

• 23:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Every little thing that the US and the West have done to hamper China's ability to play in cutting-edge technology doesn't seem like it's working. There's been restrictions to the silicon that they can use in China, and now DeepSeek has shown there in the game. Now, look, maybe it started with a Llama model, and they've just kind of Frankenstein'd it. But anyway, they've done it. It exists. Then you think about phones, right? There have been efforts to make sure that the processors within phones that are the most advanced don't get into the hands of Chinese phone manufacturers. I think the Huawei Mate 70 is a real advance, and maybe on par with the iPhone in some ways, or maybe US smartphones in some ways.

• 24:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Anyway, it's definitely cutting into the margins of Apple. Apple's struggling within China. US handset makers are struggling there. And it's almost like a point of national pride there. I was there recently, just for a very brief stop, but it seems to me like the government ban of iPhones within Chinese government offices is legit. And, you know, part of the way that they can do that is because they've gotten around these restrictions. So talk a little bit about why the West has failed on that front.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  I wouldn't necessarily say it's failed, because most of the restrictions are, kind of, call it headwinds, or are kind of slowing, not stopping, right? And so, the question is, what degree has it actually successfully slowed? Now, part of the reason why I'm a supporter of the CHIPS Act and other kind of efforts is because I think part of the thing that we, as a world, including America, have to kind of demand from China is kind of a level playing field. So if they say, hey, we can sell our stuff everywhere in the world, you know, and we can subsidize it in various ways that make it, you know, less, you know, kind of free-market competitive, and we're restricted from how you can sell things here.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  That's a kind of a mercantilist policy that you have to essentially respond to. And I think that part of the CHIPS Act is to say, well, if you're going to be playing this mercantilist policy, we're also going to, you know, put some brakes on, you know, kind of your ability to develop

• 26:13Speaker 01

  the kind of the large size, very effective clusters that we think the next generation of AI models are going to be very dependent upon because it doesn't surprise me, I mean, GPT-4 was built on A100s. Doesn't surprise me that with the current kind of A100s and other things, you could build another GPT-4 model. So that's not as surprising. And, you know, we have H100s going to Blackwells. And the question is, what is the speed at which we're going to be getting into that? And I think that's part of the game that's, you know, still afoot. And so I don't think it's a failure. And I do think that

• 26:52Speaker 01

  it's the right thing for the US to be doing, given that China is generally taking a kind of a mercantilist competitive position. And I think that's something that the US and other, you know, kind of countries, Europe and everything else should be opposed to.

• 27:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  You mentioned the Blackwell, which is Nvidia's cutting-edge chips. All the headlines have been showing that they've been having some trouble getting them to production or getting the yields they want. And there have been some delays. I feel like, Reed, you'd probably have a pretty good window into what's going on there. Maybe not like what's happening in the halls of Nvidia, though you might, but certainly what type of delays we're seeing, given that you work with Microsoft and you invest in startups, like, is this, is this a real concern? Like, is this going to be a bigger story over time if they can't get their yields up and produce the Blackwell chip the way that everybody is anticipating?

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Well, it's definitely if they can't get their yields up and produce it, that will be a, you know, concerning thing for Nvidia and will slow down some of, you know, kind of AI's development because the faster chips in a dense environment is actually, in fact, instrumental and helpful.

• 28:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  And is that a legit concern?

• 28:05Speaker 01

  It slows it down, it doesn't stop it. And, but, you know, on the other hand, and, you know, look, I think this is, again, one of the things where the actual timing matters. It's actually not atypical for either Nvidia or chip manufacturers to sometimes be

• 28:20Speaker 01

  You know, to have six to 12 month error bars in the stuff they're doing. And even though, you know, public markets tend to be the, oh my God, this quarter. And it's like, well, the real thing is, what does the next two to three years look like? And so I, you know, maybe this is my, my longer term venture perspective. I tend to go, well, you know, a quarter here, a quarter there. You know, it doesn't really matter in the three to 10 year, you know, kind of time horizon. And so maybe I'm a little bit too casual on this, but you know, time will tell.

• 28:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, you can, you can be chill given your position, but public market investors will, will freak out. But I guess we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Okay. I want to speak more about your book, which I think is sort of like, in some ways, a manifesto to the world, talking about the positive uses of AI and why that book needed to be written. So we know that there's some issues with trust in AI and maybe that's the reason. I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions about it when we come back right after this. This episode is brought to you by Apppoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about.

• 29:32Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 30:22Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 31:07Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 31:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Reid Hoffman. Reid has a new book out called Super Agency: What Could Possibly Go Right? About our AI future. And as I teased before the break, I think it's going to be quite interesting to see this question, what could possibly go right? Because a lot of people seem to be thinking, what could go wrong? Every survey you look at, I was just looking at one beforehand, has a remarkable level of distrust in AI. I think it was a PWC study that I just looked at that said 61% of people do not trust artificial intelligence. So I'm curious if you could comment on why there's so much distrust here? And then again, your book is all about what could go right. There's a great chapter in it all about, like, think about the best-case scenario.

• 32:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  And so tell me a little bit about the motivation behind that.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Well, very much broadly, most human beings start with a new technology with distrust. You could see similar dialogue, you know, in recent history with the internet or mobile phone and kind of go, oh, my gosh, this is going to like corrupt our children. This is going to interfere with our ability to have, you know, a quiet time to think. There's going to be mayhem. And so that's always with new massive technologies, the first human response. And that human response is reflected in everything from, you know, individual consumers, what do you think about this thing? You don't know. It's like, I don't know. To journalists, to academics, to political leaders, and even sometimes technologists in this.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  And so that's the kind of typical pattern. So part of the reason why I wrote super agency was to say, by the way, this pattern has gone back to the history of the written word and the printing press, and has done everything from the power loom and industrial revolution, cars, planes, the entire thing. And so this is actually, in fact, a common pattern of this technology means the end of what I think of as human agency. And I think actually, in fact, at the end, it ends up being super agency. And as opposed to that, it's like, no, no, we create great things with these. Now, that doesn't mean there's no concerns.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  The transitions are almost always difficult. We want to learn from the past to make these transitions now better, even though there's new difficulties as well in the transitions. And part of the reason why a focus on agency is not just because we have this discussion with AI as being this new agentic technology, which adds a little confusion to people, but it's because when you think about the kinds of things that people are worried about, whether it's privacy, whether it's misinformation, whether it's jobs, other things, this all actually resolves the questions around human agency. And actually, when you look at both the historical things with these massively disruptive

• 34:24Speaker 01

  technologies and also AI, I think we're going to see a great increase in human agency. We just, and it will happen, I think, no matter what, but I think we want to navigate it in even better ways. And that's part of the reason why, you know, writing a book.

• 34:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And so it's so interesting because a lot of those technologies that you mentioned, you mentioned the printing press, I think, which was followed by lots of war because people started fighting wars over ideas. The loom, I mean, the industrial revolution wasn't pretty for folks in the immediate aftermath. Like, all of the introduction of these technologies kind of sucked for the people who were there during the transition. And I was reading through your blurbs and I found the funniest one. It's from Yuval Noah Harari, who like really writes about how tough a lot of these transitions have been. He says, "I disagree with some of the main arguments, but I nevertheless hope they are right." Read it and judge for yourself. "But what makes you convinced that we're not going to have a problematic start here?"

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Well, I do think that there will be challenge and like, I'm not trying to delude anyone that there won't be real transition issues. We as human beings adopt new technologies fitfully and conflictually and with a lot of, you know, kind of like storm and drong. And so I anticipate problems. Part of the reason why to write super agency to kind of say, "Hey, how do we navigate these transitions?" Is we say, "Well, what are the issues we're going to have? And what are the positive futures we want to get to? And how do we navigate that in the most human and most compassionate, wise, possible way?" Doesn't mean there won't be pain and challenge and suffering. But, for example, a classic one with AI is to say, "Well, this is going to change a lot of jobs." And it will because

• 36:08Speaker 01

  it's a kind of a new toolset, like a new toolset. Like, if you say, "Hey, I'm a professional today and I don't use smartphones and I don't use computers," you're like, "I'm not really sure you're a professional," right? It's a required part of the toolset in terms of how you operate. And a bunch of the tools within each profession. It's like, "Well, I'm a graphic designer, but I don't use Figma and I don't use Adobe." And you're like, "No, you're probably not a graphic designer, really." And so I think that AI is going to have that kind of transformation. Now, you say, "Well..." What's gonna happen is like, well, a bunch of jobs of human beings are gonna be done, or it's going to be replaced by other humans using AI. But AI can help with that transition, can help the human learn how to use it,

• 36:52Speaker 01

  can help the human use AI to do the job in a new way, can help find if there's, if it's like, well, I'm no longer well-suited for this. What other jobs might I be able to find? How can I learn and do those? AI can be part of the solution. And that's part of the kind of the, the kind of optimist message is not that, hey, your, everyone's lives, everyone's work stays exactly the same. And now we just have a little bit of salt and pepper of AI. No, there's gonna be big transitions. But we can be helped with those transitions. And then people say, well, but I don't want to do the transition. It's like, well, you know, I understand, I'm sympathetic. We should try to be as helpful as possible. But if, you know, as I go into some depth in the, in the book,

• 37:37Speaker 01

  if the Luddites had successfully destroyed all the power looms and said, well, no, we want to have independent weaving, then that would have meant the, that their children, their grandchildren, et cetera, would have been kind of doomed to poverty and less relevance. And so that's part of the reason why, you know, kind of in the global sphere of technology adoption, it's very important in the cognitive industrial revolution that, that for, for, for, not just for yourself, but for your children, grandchildren, your society, that you're in the forefront of doing this. And that's, that's one of the things that is part of being a responsible citizen, a responsible member of your industry.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  And by the way, it doesn't mean that your life has to suck. I mean, you can learn the new technology, you can, you can make it work.

• 38:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  On that note, AI can code pretty well. Is learn to code good advice?

• 38:32Speaker 01

  Yes, although, by the way, of course, coding will be changing. So as opposed to the previous skill set, this kind of like example of transformation is like, okay, I learned to do very precise semantics of how, when I'm using, you know, Objective C, how I do memory management, you know, et cetera, et cetera. You'll need to understand the concepts of kind of code. But AI will, will, will, will be the kind of generation, a massive generator, a massive quality assurance checker, a bunch of other things. You'll still want to be learning the kind of, as it were, the, the pattern of the computing and coding mindset.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  But now, as opposed to like the, oh, I'm really, really good at the rigid syntax. That will be less relevant, not zero relevant, but less relevant. And what will be more relevant is conceptualizing. Like, oh, this is the kind of thing you can do with code. And one of the things I think will be interesting with the AI revolution is all of us will have a coding co-pilot and assistant on our PC, on our phone, that will help us do these things. And so when we think about like, you know, how do we accomplish some kind of professional task? How we do information gathering, information analysis, report generation, et cetera. We will actually, in fact, be using coding assistants to help us do this. And now that will be available to everybody.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  And that will, you know, kind of speed up the level of, of informational intelligence. Part of the reason why in the book, we call it an informational GPS in terms of how you operate. And so I think, yes, AI is great at code. And yes, that will be a massive accelerant across a wide variety of professions and a wide variety of industries.

• 40:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  Now, as I read the book, maybe this was explicit, maybe it was implicit. But I had a little, I basically heard your voice through the lines, telling policymakers, oh, don't, don't regulate this, or don't make a mistake regulating this. And so I want to ask you just practically. Do you think there's a chance that this stuff gets regulated? And if so, what regulation do you think might be put into place?

• 40:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, regulation is a hot topic, but I don't think a lot of people have interest in it because our, at least in the US, our lawmakers talk a big game, but they do basically nothing on tech. Maybe in Europe they do, but Europe has been plagued with companies not wanting to release products there. I mean, even Apple Intelligence isn't available in Europe and Apple Intelligence does basically nothing. So I'm curious what your take is on the regulation side.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Well, the problem with most people's default modes of regulation, including a lot of regulators and including a lot of European regulators, is you say, well, our job is to protect bad things from happening. And by the way, the simplest way to do that is to prevent anything from happening. Right? And so you really massively slow everything down, which means that you you know, disadvantage your own innovators, your own industry. It's part of the reason why the tech industry, you know, tends to be evolving very fast from the US and from China and not as much from Europe because of that kind of mindset and approach. And then people say, oh, you're saying you should not regulate at all. It's like, well, no, but try to be smart about it. So for example, when, when you're building things in the future,

• 42:00Speaker 01

  and we have this chapter in the super agency saying innovation is safety. You can actually build a bunch of things that are in the future that are part of that, that, that safety and that future safety, and it's important to get to. And by the way, what you want is you want small errors and small problems that you're learning, hence iterative deployment, that you then fix as it gets to scale. And that's the way you create a safe future. Now, for example, most often when people get to regulating and they think about regulation and important technologies, they always get to regulating. And preventing bad things from happening at scale is an important function for regulation in the government. But they say, well, I'll just, I'll just start like saying thou shalt and thou shalt not right now.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  It's like, well, actually, in fact, engaging in dialogue, finding out what's happening. If you can articulate what your concern is as a, as a metric that you can run, you say, hey, I'd like to see. Information about job loss, job displacement, and other kinds of things, I'd like to see what's happening in that so that if if there is such, I can start figuring out if I need to do anything, create an incentive that's different, create a rule that's different in order to do that. And that that engaging in dialogue and measurement first is a great way to enable things to happen. You have to always be remembering that the toolset of the future can be so much better than

• 43:26Speaker 01

  the toolset of now. And we don't want to to to to stop that toolset, not just for its opportunities, but for also what it might mean for the things that that regulation cares about, like safety and kind of the well functioning of society.

• 43:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so this show is going to air last week of January. The inauguration's already happened in this world. We're talking right before it. And looking back in terms of the way that regulation has played out over the past four years, I'm curious what your opinion is of the job that Lina Khan did as the head of the FTC. I mean, she's currently still at FTC. I'm sure that when this airs, she'll either be out or on the way out. What's your view on her performance?

• 44:13Speaker 01

  Well, I've made, you know, kind of some, you know, comments on television shows before. And I thought that, you know, she misunderstands like kind of the role of how to stop the aggregation of of power in large tech companies, because she says, well, if she stops large tech companies from buying small startups, what that means is venture capitalists like myself, and this was made entirely as a venture capitalist statement, don't invest major dollars in companies that might be end up competing with large tech companies, because you need, as we were talking about OpenAI, you need to have that 1X possibility

• 44:51Speaker 01

  of getting back to make major dollars. So as opposed to stopping the aggregation of of of major tech power by by slowing down all this M and A, actually, in fact, that policy will actually in fact aggregate power in the large tech by by having less startup competition. And that's that that's my personal. Now, she's done a great job on like drug pricing and Anti-competes and a bunch of other things. So I made kind of a specific thing that is like, you know, we want to be in favor of investing in startups at every level of scale. And we need to be enabling that to be creating the diversity of competition.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  Because we want to be, we want to be not, you know, five to seven large tech companies heading to three. We want to be five to seven large tech companies heading to 20. And venture investment is what enables that.

• 45:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  And so then what did you guys do with Inflection? I mean, it was one of the more confusing. I don't know if you call it an acquisition or a migration or. All right, so folks, what happened, I think, was that Mustafa Soliman and a bunch of folks from Inflection went over to Microsoft to start to run consumer products. Almost as if Microsoft acquired the company, but the company stayed, you know, standing and is, I guess, still operating. Is this just a consequence of what was going on in the regulatory environment at the moment? And how does that work?

• 46:20Speaker 01

  Well, the, the basic thought from an Inflection standpoint is that the original model wouldn't really work, which is building frontier models for doing a consumer agent, that the cost curves to the revenue curves and, and what you would have to do wouldn't work as a startup. And so we kind of looked at it and said, we have to pivot. The company has pivoted to a, you know, kind of a B to B model and is working with a variety of, of, of companies now. It keeps its, its landmark and still very special kind of agent, PI, live. So, you know, PI, PI, personal intelligence, pun intended. You know, AI, you can find it on, you know, both the internet and also on, on, on various, you know, app stores.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  And, and to do that pivot. And so, you know, part of what Mustafa is like, well, but I really wanted to be creating this agent. And so we could make this deal work, you know, economically by getting this kind of big licensing deal and ability to, to kind of do a, a non-excuse of, of license of the technology and bring over a set of the, the, the team that really. Wants to continue to be working on the consumer scale agent while we'll hire other people who are like interested in the B two B model. And so, you know, it's a lot of different moving parts, but you know, it's something that that investors of Inflection were happy with. It was something that allows the the kind of Mustafa and the team to continue

• 47:45Speaker 01

  to build, you know, broad based consumer agent. And yes, it was a, it was a, it was a, you know, kind of a, a complex deal, but you know, a large scale deals usually are complex.

• 47:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  In a different regulatory environment, that's an acquisition, right?

• 48:00Speaker 01

  It certainly could be. And by the way, Inflection, you know, who knows, maybe some year will still be acquired.

• 48:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  UFC potentially on the way. So, yeah. You're politically involved. It's been, we're talking again mid-January. It's been pretty remarkable to see the parade of tech CEOs, everyone from Mark Zuckerberg to Jeff Bezos, Elon, we know, gravitating towards Trump for the second term in a way that they didn't for the first. What's happening there? What do you think they're trying to get out of Trump? And do you view this as a, a change in their politics, an authentic change in their politics? Or is this pragmatic?

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Well, I think, you know, one of the things about technology is a more important global business. And if you're doing global, you have to have good relationships with multiple governments, including, of course, your home country. And I think that that's, you know, part of what you're seeing reflected in what's happening here. And I do think that one of the things that's really important is we focus as, you know, kind of Americans and how do we build American prosperity, American industry? How do we kind of, you know, take a leadership position in the world? It's really important to be working with the government well. And so I think what you're seeing is people saying, hey, that's, that's, that's, that's part of how we build great things for America. And so they're, they're doing the things that they think are important to do there.

• 49:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  So it sounds like you don't really think this is an authentic move, then?

• 49:31Speaker 01

  I think it depends on different folks and, you know, I, I, look, part of my thing is, we had an election in 24, in 25, what everyone should be focused on is how do we build, you know, kind of more strength into American industry and the American middle class and, and kind of our position. And so that's what I'm personally focused on in 25. And so, you know, I, that's what I think everyone's doing for, in different ways, but, but it, you know, I think people should answer this for themselves.

• 50:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Do you think they're gonna get what they want?

• 50:05Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, pre-game speculation, you know, given that we're so close to being in the game, I think we, I think we want to watch to see how it plays out.

• 50:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, that's fair. Elon Musk is now extremely close to Trump. They call him the first buddy. He's basically living at Mar-a-Lago. He, he does not have a, a good relationship with Sam Altman. And there's already been discussion of whether he will use his proximity to Trump to try to challenge Altman and OpenAI. I mean, some ideas have been that the US government looks more deeply into the transition from nonprofit to for-profit and, you know, potentially is, looks at some punishments there. Do you, do you see that as, as a feasible thing? Like, do you, I mean, I know,

• 50:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  again, this is speculation, but you know, both of them, is that a real concern?

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Well, again, pre-game, about to happen, over speculation mistake. But, you know, on a positive note, you know, Sam has tweeted that, you know, he doesn't anticipate Elon, you know, engaging in that kind of behavior. And Elon has retweeted those sections saying, yep, that's totally right. So that's at least positive data. But again, we're in a, we're in a, we're, we're in kind of pre-game speculation. So, you know, I know, I, I think it's really important for us to be building and doing the right thing. And I do think it's really important to have, you know, kind of like a vigorous AI industry for, you know, kind of American prosperity. And I think that's, that's, you know, so hopeful.

• 51:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, yeah, everybody, you would imagine everybody be on the same page on that. So I guess we're again, yeah, we'll see it all play out.

• 51:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  All right, let's do a quick lightning round with some of your tweets. I think you have a pretty good Twitter presence. And I think it's always nice because, you know, the things that people fire off in a moment, maybe that's pretty telling in terms of what they think about the world. So a couple from you, one, very soon, voice will become the main interface and AI will get better at learning what exactly you're looking for. So you really think voice is going to be my voice?

• 52:22Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. One of the party tricks I do is I bring out my phone and put chat GPT on audio mode to show people. Because part of when we learn to use phones or PCs, we've learned in with GUIs and everything else, we've made it softer, but there's a very precise semantics. One of the things that that language models allow us to do is to talk to it. And so now, like you can prompt, you know, chat GPT with just like, kind of almost like word salad and still get something very interesting. So you don't have to, and so it allows you to be more, you know, kind of inchoate and and speculative and brainstorming with it. And you can actually have a useful conversation and create useful artifacts from that, whether it's on your phone or PC.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  And so that's part of the reason why I've, I've, you know, made that as a prediction.

• 53:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. Yeah, I'm with you on that. It's pretty amazing speaking with these things. Okay. Last one I want to talk to you about is prompting. You mentioned prompting just before. Prompting is a skill that can 10x you as an employee, creative, et cetera. As we learn how to prompt AI, I wonder if we'll be able to prompt, better prompt each other. Any advice for prompting? I mean, you have your own AI bot, but you know, we are all trying to prompt better. What's working for you?

• 53:39Speaker 01

  So here's a simple thing, and obviously, the book before super agency was impromptu, which is trying to show people, you know, not just show, like tell how it's amplification intelligence, but show and through kind of some examples of the chrome of prompting. But here's a simple thing is that the large language models are very good at role taking. So you prompt it with, I want you to answer this from this perspective. Now, a classic one is you want to sharpen your thinking, like, so I think X, are you against me? Let's take the role of the of the of the contrary advocate. But also, by the way, could be the, I would be curious about like what other ways you might argue for my position. But then, as you begin to get to it, you say, well, so I'm writing a book on super agency.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  I'm writing a book on, you know, kind of like, what is the like, technology mean for the kind of the evolution of humanity and human agency? So here is my arguments. What would a historian of technology say about this? What would a European historian of technology say about this? And you can begin to get some richer perspectives on this to help sharpen your thinking, because as you tell the AI to adopt this particular kind of prompting, you know, like a kind of informational perspective, it's one of the things that can make it useful and directed and deeper in the things you're looking at. So think about like the different kinds of role, like, like if I was talking to an expert

• 55:08Speaker 01

  of the mode of, you know, whatever, a marketing expert, a sales expert, a financial service expert, a a a a short trading, a person who does public market trading who specializes in shorts. What would they say here? And you can do all that, and that can really help you in your prompting.

• 55:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's cool. And I'm sure if the books aren't already there, you could probably upload a book, like some good sales or marketing books and say, I want you to read this and now, you know, come up with a strategy based on the book, like, hope it's not a strategy, you know, throw that in there and see what it spits out. All right, Reid, so great to speak with you. Let's call the book out one more time. Book is called Super Agency. What could possibly go right with our AI future? It's out in all bookstores today. I encourage you to go pick it up. Reid, great to speak with you for the first time. Thanks again for founding LinkedIn. Of course, we're part of the LinkedIn Podcast Network. Alex, always a pleasure. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 56:07Speaker 02

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