Reid riffs on AI and public service technology

Following an inspiring conversation with JusticeText co-founder Devshi Mehrotra, Aria asks Reid about other opportunities for AI to support public infrastructure. Plus, Reid discusses the state of venture funding and OpenAI’s $6.6 billion round. 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.

• 0:03Reid Hoffman?

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

• 0:08Aria 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?

  So Reid, in our conversation with an entrepreneur that we both admire, Devshi Marotra, we talked about how and why her startup, Justice Text, designs AI tools that are helping public defenders with insane caseloads and helping them better serve their clients. So on this note of how AI can be used to help reshape and reframe public systems that are overburdened at best and perhaps broken at worst, what are other specific public sector spaces where you think that AI can have an immediate impact right now?

• 0:58Reid Hoffman?

  I think the answer is a huge number. We could do an entire podcast or even series on all of the different areas. You know, and there's a number of different organizations. There's Code for America, which is doing things to try to provide essential services. There's companies like Federer Ellis Lampkin's Promise, kind of doing a financial systems management and having a really good business model that aligns a business model for elevating the cases of these under-resourced communities. And those are just examples within what we know. There's obviously tons of stuff within education, legal, medical, economic, justice, all of these areas. It's one of the reasons why public

• 1:43Reid Hoffman?

  service technology is really important. And then AI, the revolution it's bringing is a natural language interface. Together with a depth of knowledge to help bring these kind of intelligence and cognitive tools from everything from an individual community member to cases like with Devshi, public defenders who are doing an important, critical role in our society to make sure that innocent people don't get convicted and that people's rights are respected. Even if in the case where, for example, you might have some weed in the trunk, but the way that weed is discovered, the importance is how the rights play because rights aren't

• 2:28Reid Hoffman?

  just for wealthy people, they're for all people.

• 2:33Aria Finger?

  And it's interesting, one of the things that Devshi said last week was that you don't always even need the cutting-edge technology to make government work better. Obviously, we want the best of the best to be working in our government, but sometimes there's actually simple technologies that can make things a lot better. And I've heard you say many times, like, one of the things we need is more folks in government to just have technology experience, to understand it, to maybe have a stint in the private sector, to be schooled in it, to have education. Like, that can go a long way if we just have folks who understand and appreciate what technology can do for us. And so it was interesting hearing about her background. I mean, she had intern stints at Microsoft Research and DeepMind, Peking University, Stanford Law.

• 3:17Aria Finger?

  Like, I imagine your answer is probably going to be both, but do you see more sort of generational founders in the AI space coming from the private sector, academia, both? How do you see those interplay?

• 3:29Reid Hoffman?

  Well, I think we want to figure out how to enable as much technological knowledge in government and public services we can. Basically, technology is transforming the landscape of what's possible. Technology enables what can happen at scale, and society is always scale.

• 3:53Reid Hoffman?

  So whether it's government officials making decisions and making intelligent decisions about how technology does this, whether it's a lot of technology deployment happens within private sectors, it's the knowledge of like scale software systems like AI and that kind of application, a lot of new inventions and kind of, you know, looking at the world sideways or depth of research conditions come from universities, which also specifically train people to kind of have the skills for, you know, kind of modern work, modern universe, you know, modern industry, you know, modern society. And, and so the short answer, we're

• 4:37Reid Hoffman?

  going to need all of it. And you can't just do universities because, for example, like with AI, a lot of the kind of the in-depth AI revolution is coming from corporations because they are our best technology in the entire world and every society in the world for how do you assemble a bunch of resources on a risky competitive adventure. And so the AI development is from there more than universities, not zero from universities, but more as is part of how it's happening right now today. But also, of course, in the cases with like Devshi, you have young people who go, I want to be dedicating my

• 5:19Reid Hoffman?

  life to solving these kinds of public problems. And she kind of got the experience within these research organizations, understand what it is, and then immediately went into entrepreneurship, creating the product and business and sustaining institutions that are new businesses in order to make it happen. So in some sense, she's a little bit more from academia than from industry as a way of doing this, but you need that kind of useful energy as well. And we are so far behind on how it is we, we get technology into the public sphere, in part because People, you know, kind of overly go, the public sphere must be completely separate from the corporate sphere. And actually, in fact, figuring out new ways of public-private

• 6:03Reid Hoffman?

  partnerships, I think are going to really key. And obviously, there's challenges to navigate, like you don't want to have the corruption of having public coffers go into private industry where all it is, is a, is not the solving the problem, but it's just capturing of a sales channel versus the solving of a societal lead. And you have to worry about that kind of stuff in, in these things. But because the scale technology is essentially only built within the private sphere, especially within a bunch of what's going on in AI, we need to align good public-private missions. And of course, I think we do that as well.

• 6:43Aria Finger?

  So zooming out to the AI space more broadly, speaking of that, that private industry that can have the capital and resources to do big things, not too long ago, as everyone knows, OpenAI raised what I think was the largest venture capital deal of all time. They raised $6.6 billion. And what do we think about this? Is this an anomaly? What does this mean for the AI space? And do you think we're going to see more funding rounds of this magnitude in the future?

• 7:11Reid Hoffman?

  Well, I think it's unique because it's a particular path by which OpenAI stays to a nonprofit mission, starts as a nonprofit, scales a company that's a public benefit corp for navigating these bigger things and is focused on AI for the benefit of humanity. And so it's a first, but it's probably not a first that will never be repeated because part of what happens is we get to this kind of globally connected world is we do see all throughout the entire venture industry, venture capital rounds scaling. When I started my own career, you know, kind of a couple hundred thousand dollar seed round was, was

• 7:52Reid Hoffman?

  like a big deal. And now, you know, seed rounds can be even tens of millions of dollars, right? In some cases. And then we, of course, we get to, as the whole venture industry also scales out, we have more entrepreneurs like Devshi, Phaedra, others, who are like, how do we make the business models work for this scaling of the impact? And that it runs as a company, but it runs as a company that fits into a critical part of improving societal infrastructure that helps the kind of

• 8:32Reid Hoffman?

  lower income communities navigate life better, potentially have a better opportunity at the American dream for improving themselves because they have a more stable basis and are a more integrated part of society. And in Devshi's case, the rights that come with that, in Fajr's case, the financial management. And so I think that we'll see all of this happen. But now to the AI thing, I think we're just at the beginning of the what AI will mean for society, for work, for individuals' lives. And I think that these financing rounds were not at market peak, we're at market beginning.

• 9:16Aria Finger?

  Well, so question about that. Obviously, the folks who are building their own models, training and creating their own models, like, you know, OpenAI are raising these, you know, eye popping rounds. 20 years ago, people would be like, what is going on? But I feel like a lot of other people say that because, you know, AI can enhance what a company can do, you know, a company can do so much more with five people or 10 people, they're not going to need as much money to scale. Do you also see in a way that maybe some companies will be raising less or no venture capital at all because they don't need it? Like, do you see in some ways it's going to be less? Or no, you think that it's just going to continue the trend of raising more and more dollars?

• 9:57Reid Hoffman?

  Well, I think there will be a range. So sometimes there will be smaller rounds. But I don't think AI, even though it's kind of provisioned by, you know, Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, kind of the hyperscalers in these, it doesn't just, it will enable certain things to be cheaper. But just like, for example, you know, it used to be you have to would buy, have to buy, and many of our listeners may not even know what this is, a whole bunch of very expensive sun equipment in order to do server stuff. Now you can use the cloud. It's much cheaper and more dynamic infrastructure. But that still means that you need to like raise a bunch of money to realize your market opportunity, hire people.

• 10:40Reid Hoffman?

  It's a competitive thing frequently between company one, company two, company three, capital is part of the competition. So I think broadly speaking, we do get to larger and larger capital raises within a more globally connected market, a more globally competitive market, et cetera. And as people realize that massive returns are possible, more capital flows in. And so AI's transformation of every industry will mean that more capital is flowing in that people will then deploy to get to market blitzscaling more quickly, et cetera. So it doesn't lead to smaller capital allocations.

• 11:25Reid Hoffman?

  Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network. It's hosted by Ari Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Aller, Sarah Schlead, Adrian Bain, and Paloma Moreno Jimenez. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.

• 11:44Aria Finger?

  Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Sayida Sepieva, Ian Ellis, Greg Beato, Ben Relis, Parth Patel, and Little Monster Media Company.