Reid riffs on iterative development and cultural differences

What does productive collaboration between big tech developers and the rest of the world actually look like? This week, Reid gets into the value of competition, iterative development, learning mindsets, and red teaming in tech and business—in the United States and globally. 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.

• 0:00Reid Hoffman?

  I'm Reid Hoffman.

• 0:01Aria Finger?

  And I'm Aria Finger.

• 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.

• 0:17Reid Hoffman?

  This is possible.

• 0:20Aria Finger?

  So Reid, some of the criticism recently of AI is that it is in the hands of the big players, whether it's Microsoft and Google developing their own AI or buying smaller companies or siphoning off developers. And some could say that's a good thing. We have these enormous companies who are spending enormous budgets on research and development that, candidly, other folks don't have. So can you talk about, like, what does productive collaboration between big tech developers and everyone else actually look like?

• 0:52Reid Hoffman?

  You know, it's one of the areas where there's obviously a lot of turmoil and kind of different perspectives on this. Here's some basic attributes. So one, it's very good for human society and for entrepreneurs and for consumers that there is a number of different companies that are competing with each other. You know, that competitive landscape, I think, creates a bunch of, not just competition, but potential for collaboration. Because, for example, large tech companies go, well, we want to have developers and startups working on our ecosystem and our cloud. How do we provide tools? So like, the earliest stuff from OpenAI and Microsoft was a set of APIs in order to enable small companies and entrepreneurs in terms of doing this.

• 1:37Reid Hoffman?

  There's a question around, you know, kind of an interest in global scale and providing a set of things. I think that one of the things that is kind of most important that is happening but gets under-described in terms of what its importance is, is this kind of phrase around iterative development, which is, you know, like, get stuff out there and get people to engage with it. Because if you get stuff out there and get people to engage with it,

• 2:07Reid Hoffman?

  helps solidify what this landscape of, these are really positive possibilities and these are really things to avoid in terms of what's going on. And that iterative development is, I think, one of the things that's so important in what's going on. And frequently, it can get lost in a slowdown and, you know, have blue ribbon commissions before you do things. But Like the tools for making this thing more of an implication of humanity of steering towards very positive outcomes and away from negative outcomes, the tool sets richer in the future. And so all of that impulse tends to not to incorporate those understandings. And that's why the iterative element is very important. And, you know, obviously, as James

• 2:50Reid Hoffman?

  went through and in some good depth, it's important that it isn't just, you know, like, for example, only people in Silicon Valley, right? And not just only people in the US. It's, you know, how do we get this to a, you know, broader scope of it? And it's one of the things that I think, you know, OpenAI has done extremely well. It's one of the things I think is happening through the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

• 3:12Aria Finger?

  I think what a lot of people who are outside the technology field misunderstand is specifically the iterative deployment, because in some fields, you would never put something out there until it was perfect. And this sort of idea that you were getting user feedback and iterating, is there a tension between that iterative deployment and red teaming, which is so critical in terms of safety vulnerabilities and making sure that we're putting out things that are safe for consumers to use?

• 3:35Reid Hoffman?

  Actually, quite the opposite of tension. I think there's reinforcement. It's a positive reinforcement move because, yes, you should clearly, as per, you know, the Biden-Harris excellent executive order, have some red teaming in there. You should be considering what could go wrong, right? And you should be red teaming. And then, by the way, you red team, you do iterative deployment, you see what was right and wrong about your red teaming, you go, oh, we missed this. And this was an important thing, because, and we wouldn't have known it without really iterative deploying. Like metaphors I've used, if you said, well, we're not going to launch the automobile until we understand everything. Well, maybe we might have gotten the seat belts before we launch the automobile, but we probably would have had 100 other things that were completely irrelevant. And then

• 4:17Reid Hoffman?

  we never would have launched the automobile. So part of the iterative deployment is, yes, you launch it, you get the automobile, and then as you get the automobile, you go, oh, safe belts are a good idea. Let's have seat belts, right? That's the kind of the tangible metaphor for this kind of thing. And then wraps back in a red team. Like, what could go wrong here that that gets better shaped?

• 4:38Reid Hoffman?

  By what you're learning from iterative deployment.

• 4:41Aria Finger?

  So thinking, thinking of iterative deployment, you know, Google was obviously in the headlines last year when Gemini was generating from the funny, like 90% of hockey players, ice hockey players being people of color and women to, you know, more, more disturbing, you know, lots of Nazis being people of color, et cetera. And so some people might say this was egregious. Other people might say, yeah, it was bad headlines for Google, but it didn't really hurt anyone. They fixed it quickly. Like this is what we do. We put something out and we fix it. Like, what's your take there?

• 5:16Reid Hoffman?

  So, look, it's, it's definitely in the category of, you know, fender scrapes. Like, it's kind of like, yes, is it embarrassing? Yes. Was it, is it the kind of thing that you should have red teaming, you know, never allowed to happen? It's like, well, no, that doesn't actually, in fact, you know, when I, when I tend to think of like, what are the things to prevent never happening? It's things like break the entire system, cause, you know, mortality or deep injury, you know, that kind of stuff. And so that's, that's what you're primarily trying to do. And so unforced footfall to errors from Google and, and trying to do the right thing.

• 5:55Aria Finger?

  But thinking about the right thing, you know, last week, when we talked with James, we talked about, you know, what is fair? Different societies have different values on that. And you could imagine that, you know, when you're, when you're asking, you know, AI about climate change, like you don't want to talk about both sides. Like you want to be like, no, there are facts that climate change exists. There are facts that vaccines work. Like you don't want to get into a bad place where we're both sizing everything. But on the other hand, immigration, is immigration good for the United States? Well, you know, there's, there's many smart arguments on both sides and how our system should work, et cetera. Like, how should that be taken into account by big tech? They're creating these very powerful machines.

• 6:37Reid Hoffman?

  Well, that's funny because I do agree that there is an importance about being Rigorous about truth, the easiest one is scientific method, hence vaccines, climate change, etc. And in that rigor about truth, you know, kind of having a cohesion and drive, even if you have political antagonists, whether those political antagonists come from economic interests, or political antagonists come from religious interests, or political antagonists come from cultural, no, don't want to change anything. I mean, there's, there's a wide variety of religious sects that say, you know, we, you know, we don't believe in the germ theory of disease. You know, it's like, okay, right? Like, that's important. Now, you said immigration.

• 7:21Reid Hoffman?

  I actually think immigration is one of the ones where there's some just clear truths as well. And so, for example, you know, what has contributed to centuries of American prosperity is a set of different immigration. So I think immigration has had a historical, you know, proof point about history. Even if you look at the micro of it, and you say, let's, let's just focus on like, high end immigration, like, say, for big tech, and say, look, big tech's going to hire software engineers. And the question is, you want them to hire the software engineers in the US, or do you want to hire them in Canada, or do you want them to hire in India, do you want them to hire in Europe? And the answer is, you'd rather have them hire them all in the US for the rest of the US society interests.

• 8:05Reid Hoffman?

  Because if they're paying, you know, an engineer, call it 400K a year, you know, then that engineer rents, goes to restaurants, dry cleaners, lawyers, accountants, right? Everything else. It essentially on shores money that goes in the entire ecosystem for everyone. So any argument that is not trying to get every single one of these people hired within US shores as possible is actually just foolishness. Now, from a big tech perspective, to wrap back to the question, you know, big tech is going to, and, you know, technology generally, they're going to hire as many technologists

• 8:48Reid Hoffman?

  as they can, because the, all industries are in the process of becoming technology companies. There's the purest ones that are the furthest outage in technology, but everything, hotel companies, not just Airbnb, but like hotel companies, and so forth. Everybody is in the process of becoming more and more of a technology company. And so it's super important to have that talent. And, um, you know, there's, there's wide swaths of, of areas in the world that have a whole bunch of technical talent. And the only question is, are they going to be employed there? Or are we going to get some percentage of them employed here and then benefit the entire rest of American society, uh, by having them employed here?

• 9:34Aria Finger?

  So Reed, I tend to agree with you on what you just said, but I still think you sort of sidestep the question. There must be an area where you think it's tricky, like affirmative action, or I don't know, they're like the value of independence versus communal living. Like there's just different, we have different values as Americans than maybe they hold in China or Japan or other places. Like, do you think that affects this discussion or you know, you don't? You think that the facts are the facts and we actually don't need to worry about those sort of cultural differences?

• 10:05Reid Hoffman?

  Well, it's both. This is the complication. Questions around, for example, you know, various conceptions around human rights in different kind of cultural things. And what do those human rights mean in terms of agency and control over your data or individual versus group and so forth? And, you know, part of the shape that we are navigating here and the shape that's, you know, building technology and all the rest, you know, comes that. Now, I think there are really important issues there. I think there's important issues to learn from. You know, so for example, as a American, there's a whole bunch of things that I think are super important within, you know, kind of the way that American values have some areas where they're a beacon of leadership, individual freedoms, do your best work, democracy,

• 10:50Reid Hoffman?

  you know, with the exception of Trump and January 6th, peaceful transition of power in, in kind of voting, you know, like these kinds of things I think are valuable, but I learn intensively. From China, from India, from Europe, in things that, you know, a part of the basis of, oh, here is the way that even we as America and we as humanity as a society should improve. And you should ultimately take that kind of learning mindset. To me, it's kind of like, well, look, these differences are an opportunity to learn and an opportunity to to have effective cognitive tension. I still have this kind of belief that we will sort out with a zone of truth. Like, I tend to think that individual human rights are really important,

• 11:34Reid Hoffman?

  even if you have a society that says, no, they're not. It's like, no, actually, in fact, I think they are, right? And I think they're manifest, even if you don't see them, in the behavior patterns that you see. But, by the way, counter, like, you know, one of the reasons I frequently call myself a pro-individual, anti-libertarian, is like, actually, in fact, how we we come together as a society is really important, too. And that's part of the reason, like in my first book, The Startup of You, I said it's like I to the we. It's I and we both matter. And, you know, the I or we. It's like, no, no, no, I and we. And it's kind of key, so. I love it.

• 12:19Reid Hoffman?

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

• 12:38Aria Finger?

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