Reid riffs on antitrust, AI coworkers, and Chinese manufacturing

Reid weighs in on the U. S. government’s latest antitrust action against Google and what it could mean for competition, innovation, and America’s tech edge. Aria also asks about the rise of Chinese electric vehicles and why BYD might be “the Tesla of tomorrow;” the geopolitical costs of tariffs; and whether saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT is worth it. 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.

• 0:02Reid Hoffman?

  I'm Reid Hoffman.

• 0:03Aria Finger?

  And I'm Aria Finger.

• 0:05Reid Hoffman?

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

• 0:10Aria Finger?

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

• 0:23Reid Hoffman?

  This is possible.

• 0:28Aria Finger?

  So Reid, there have been a lot of headlines lately on antitrust. And a federal judge ruled that Google had illegally monopolized specific online advertising markets. The DOJ is seeking the divestiture of Google Ads Manager and other assets to restore competition. No surprise, Google is fighting back. So happy to hear your thoughts on this specific case, but also, more broadly, how will recent rulings reshape the digital landscape or influence the future of innovation and competition in tech?

• 0:59Reid Hoffman?

  So not surprising. Well, actually, maybe surprising to a number of people, since I'm on the Microsoft board and, you know, obviously have to have a certain care in how I talk about antitrust, competitors with Microsoft, etc., even though my actual thing is I'm a venture capitalist. I'm on the side of scale tech. I'm on the side of building new things. And so that's where my interest in society, my interest in economics, my interest in how do we create a better world, you know, kind of most align with scale tech. So startups going to scale. And so blocking out the possibility of scale is one of the places where I think antitrust legislation can be very good and important. Now, that being said, on the Google specific case, there's a couple of notes.

• 1:43Reid Hoffman?

  So one, I think probably the most robust note is, you know, where high economics are being used to buy exclusive channels, that's probably a pretty good sign that something is being done to Lock in a monopoly or build a monopoly. The challenge in a lot of these monopoly cases is what do you take as the size of the market? For example, do you take the size of the market is the general search market? In which case you go, okay, Google is massively dominant. Or do you take it digital advertising? And because if you do digital advertising, you include meta, you include a whole bunch of other things.

• 2:23Reid Hoffman?

  And so, you know, part of the reason why there is smart people arguing on both sides is you get to a artifact of what is the comparable market to determine this? I tend to look at it as, well, where is it started? Where is it stopping potential scale up competition? And by the way, it's not all scale up competition because you say, hey, I would like to start a new desktop search company using the same techniques that Google did to build it. That's not clear that that's a benefit to society to try to squash Google enough to allow random startups or any large tech company to come in and compete. Now, the last comment is one that I think is maybe the most unpopular,

• 3:08Reid Hoffman?

  but I think it's important to track, which is, you know, as we move to more of a multipolar world. And, you know, the kind of classic thing is, for example, a US tech industry, a Chinese tech industry, you know, TikTok, et cetera. And we say, well, only the US is going to be doing monopolist remedies and the others aren't. You have to track this within national competition. And so part of the question is, is to say, is this part of a global resorting for competition? And that's actually, in fact, extremely important. Because while we definitely want, you know, the next generation of companies coming out of,

• 3:53Reid Hoffman?

  you know, Silicon Valley where I'm here, I am right now, you know, kind of talking about this. But on the other hand, of course, if you say, well, the scale ones that have the scale benefit, we're limiting ours, but we're not limiting China's, we're not limiting other prospective ones. That could be damaging, not just to obviously American industry and American prosperity and American society, but also, of course, damaging in terms of the balancing of the world. So you have to also pay attention to that. And I think one of the things that is too often not included in the considerations in these cases. Actually, I'll say one other thing, which is There's always some politics in this, even though the Google case went across different administrations.

• 4:34Aria Finger?

  Started under Trump.

• 4:35Reid Hoffman?

  Exactly. Started under Trump, continued under Biden, returned under Trump.

• 4:38Aria Finger?

  Yep.

• 4:39Reid Hoffman?

  But there's always some political considerations that are not necessarily red versus blue. There's also the, do I look like I have a win because I was fighting like I'm the anti-monopoly division, et cetera. So you always have to pay some attention to this. And so you tend to go after the targets that have more of a populist or press bent. I mean, the most obvious one for me, like if I was forced ranking all the ones that I would consider would actually in fact be the Apple App Store, right? Because you're like, okay, this is hugely locked in. You're not allowed to have other app stores. You're not allowed, like, it's very highly controlled, right? And there's some arguments around, hey, we got to maintain enough security and so forth. But by the way, that's also part of how all of these things are.

• 5:20Aria Finger?

  But they're also taking a cut of every transaction and it makes using Amazon mobile apps sort of unusable because you have to go off app to buy certain things. And so it's actually not good for consumers.

• 5:30Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah. Well, and also, like, for example, one tell that I started with Google is say, hey, you're spending massive amounts of money to lock in a, you know, effectively exclusive position. Well, that's actually a tell. But another tell is you're charging 30%.

• 5:45Aria Finger?

  Right.

• 5:46Reid Hoffman?

  Right? Off the top to everybody and making a whole bunch of money from that. And it's like, okay, well, that's another tell. So those are kind of tells where you say, well, those are things that, that, that you should examine carefully, look at this and potentially consider doing, you know, remedies on. So I guess the overall thing is I think it's good to do these things to enable, you know, scale competition. But we don't want to lose the kind of gems we have as an American society. Like, for example, probably most Americans don't realize that these companies, Google, Apple, et cetera. Get over half the revenue externally.

• 6:22Aria Finger?

  Mm hmm. Outside the US.

• 6:23Reid Hoffman?

  They're one of our, yes, they're one of our, you know, massive trade benefit companies. And you're like, okay, that's important to us as a society. Doesn't mean we shouldn't do antitrust things, but it means that we don't want to, it's not just the kind of the, you know, hit hard with hammer as a approach. It's, it's, it's be careful about maintaining the, the kind of vigorous American tech industry strength to our prosperity.

• 6:47Aria Finger?

  Right, probably not the best. And to your point, like geopolitics does matter. And so we can take that into account when we're doing these things, but there are certain tells for the position. And so, you know, the Chinese market continues to embrace AI as an accelerator and Chinese tech companies are growing their global footprints. We've seen that BYD, which is China's leading electric vehicle manufacturer, is rapidly expanding its footprint in Europe, especially as Tesla really tumbles. And so, especially with this increasing tariff regime, there are going to be some real problems with US auto manufacturers selling to Europe, which could mean that China gets a greater foothold there. What do you think that most people are still getting wrong in how they think about competition with China?

• 7:32Reid Hoffman?

  Well, there's a couple of things in terms of competition. So for example, you know, already in post, and what you said, one of the real damaging to American prosperity, American quality of life, both in purchasing of things and in jobs and everything else is actually in fact, trade partners matter. And so it's part of the reason why there's been different trading blocks and EU and NAFTA. And those trade blocks actually matter because being part of them gives the people who are in them advantages and edges against the people who are not. And so when you say, hey, I'm just going to go apply tariffs to everyone. And, you know, and the absurd thing is I'm going to apply tariffs to islands that have no people on them and penguins only. But, you know, I mean, that's just the incompetence part of the, of the whole clown show.

• 8:17Reid Hoffman?

  But when you start doing that, you're going, okay, I'm going to kind of declare trade war on everybody. Whereas what you'd want to be doing is saying, hey, I'm getting closer to my partners and allies and I'm competing with the people that I'm competing with. And so by saying, hey, we're going to declare trade aggression with Canada, trade aggression with Europe.

• 8:38Reid Hoffman?

  The natural thing for Canada and Europe to do is say, great, we'll go trade with China. Thank you very much. And your so-called compete with China policy is literally a gift to China. And by the way, the BYD product is very good. So I think this is something that is highly harming of American society. That starts from the general prosperity of our society to our functioning of our industries, to the prices and engagement of consumers in this. And I don't just mean consumers in, you know, wealthy cities. I mean, across the entire country. And so this is the thing that is kind of, call it most obviously wrong about thinking of competition in China.

• 9:21Aria Finger?

  Another interesting thing you said was that the BYD product is very good. And I think some people's conception of the world is still sort of China 10 to 15 years ago, where it's like, oh, we're going to flood the market with cheap knockoff Chinese goods. Well, no, they're doing advanced manufacturing. This isn't just, you know, low level T-shirts.

• 9:40Reid Hoffman?

  Yep, we have to think about the prosperity of our society. We're like, we want to return to manufacturing. That's great. By the way, China, which currently has the best, well, one of the best in a vector, massively important scale vector, one of the best manufacturing capabilities, societies, cultures in the world. Like when I go to Shenzhen or have gone to Shenzhen, is the only place I've gotten the experience where someone coming to Silicon Valley must feel like, holy shit, like I am seeing part of the future in terms of speed and how people are operating. It's more manufacturing there. And I think that the, the thing that we don't realize is even though they have this advantage, they're going full on AI robotics manufacturing. By the way, that's what we should be doing too.

• 10:23Reid Hoffman?

  Those will be the new manufacturing jobs of the future. You know, will be the ones working in robotic factories. That's, I think, really, really key. The Chinese know that even though they have an edge with all their human labor right now, they're building, like BYD specifically is building, is intensely roboticizing its thing. There's not only is it going to have a high quality product, it's going to be able to produce it at half the cost of, you know, any other competitor. That reduction of cost is not because of, you know, we're going to claim that it's unfair competitive practices, but it's actually in fact, well, we're just smarter about how we build it.

• 11:09Aria Finger?

  Switching gears a little bit to what I'll call the cost of being polite to AI. So OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently admitted that the addition of words and phrases like please and thank you in users' interactions with ChatGPT like come at a real cost. He tweeted that these pleasantries contribute to tens of millions of dollars in electricity costs for OpenAI each year. And so there's one thing about the dollar costs, but a lot of people are really concerned about the environmental implications in particular. Altman said that expenditures like this, tens of millions of dollars well spent. So question for you, do you think it matters like philosophically how polite we are when we communicate with AI?

• 11:54Reid Hoffman?

  Well, yes, but maybe not for the reasons that people might reflexively think, which is more about like when we're interacting with AI, it also involves us. It also involves how we behave with ourselves, with other people, not just with devices. It's actually one of the things I was always worried about, how the initial Alexa home applications were creating bad training for children or even adults who are not paying attention like stop or Gary, stop, stop question, you know, now already do this. It's like, what? It's not the way we should be interacting with each other. It's not the way we should be thinking about it. We should be kind of generally more civil, you know, politeness is actually in fact,

• 12:35Reid Hoffman?

  I think a good thing and that's worth it, let alone the question around, well, what outputs do we get? Cause by the way, you know, people who are deep studies of the prompting, you know, part of, you know, why I released the earlier book, impromptu, people who are deep studies this notice they actually get different responses from please and thank you and so forth. Because in part, this is generalized from a trillion plus words of human communication. In your prompting, when you say please or not, you're telling it a little bit about what kind of interaction you want from it, you're having from it, et cetera. And so it's actually a useful part of the prompt too. Now, I think part of what Sam's talking about here is if you go, wow, it was such a great conversation. Thank you so much.

• 13:19Reid Hoffman?

  I really appreciated it and you're not actually building something else. Then that's good for you as per my earlier comments.

• 13:27Aria Finger?

  Yeah.

• 13:27Reid Hoffman?

  Uh, and I think it's a good pattern to be in, but on the other hand, you're not getting anything out of it. And the electricity is being spent. It's like leaving the light on for an hour.

• 13:36Aria Finger?

  Totally.

• 13:37Reid Hoffman?

  Maybe you're gonna walk into the room and, you know, so it's like, you know, you could decide to be a little bit less cautious there, but I would err on the side of politeness.

• 13:47Aria Finger?

  I feel like AI might be the new waiter test. It's like it used to be when you went on a date with someone and they were rude to the waiter. That was like the ultimate red flag. And so the new red flag will be like, ah, I really like them, but they were so rude to their AI. I just, I couldn't get past it. So ma- maybe that will be in modern dating. We'll see. Um, but you mentioned something, how saying please and thank you actually couldn't be a good form of prompting. You're gonna get something better. So sort of analogous to that, do you think that OpenAI, Anthropic, Pi, et cetera? Should they be training people on how to prompt better themselves? It's like a big conversation, of course. How do you get the best prompts? But should the frontier models be doing that for their, for their users?

• 14:29Reid Hoffman?

  I mean, it's always helpful to do it. Um, I do think learning how to prompt well is really key. I do think it's really critical for people to be learning how to do this prompting in good ways. Because part of the whole AI amplifying humanity, the amplification intelligence, is the theory that we can, by us bringing something fun and interesting and unique and perspective and creativity and, you know, kind of adapting to using these tools at the table, that actually, in fact, we are much stronger together than being replaced in the work. And this is an area of active debate about, you know, within the both general work community, but also the tech community as well.

• 15:14Reid Hoffman?

  Where over time will that line of transformation versus replacement be?

• 15:18Aria Finger?

  Yep.

• 15:19Reid Hoffman?

  And, you know, I don't know. No one really knows. Like the claim that you know that for sure. Other than there will be some replacement is foolish. Because we know there will be some replacement, like for example, customer service jobs with,

• 15:34Aria Finger?

  Sure.

• 15:35Reid Hoffman?

  You know, Sierra and others doing this. But well, like for example, a hot debate, software engineers. Will software engineers be amplified? Which I think is actually in fact, myself more likely the case. Or will they be replaced? Because we're definitely getting, you know, kind of higher quality with the kind of chain of thought models and all the rest to things that could lead to better coding. Everyone's working in coding assistants. And I think what we want is we want the maximum probability chance of all the, the jobs that people want to do or have any affinity for doing are transformation jobs, not replacement jobs. Now, part of that is how we're building the technology. I'm not actually an advocate of limiting the power and scope of the technology.

• 16:19Reid Hoffman?

  Cause you go, yeah, fine. You know, make the cars really slow so humans can outrun them. It's like, no, that doesn't really work as a strategy. But the nudges to say, hey, A and B are both performance systems, but A allows a much better partnering with human capability to get a much better output. That's good for the individual, good for society, et cetera. And that gets all the way back to your question on, well, people have got to be learning to use the devices better. You gotta be learning to prompt better. And it's one of the reasons why I love Ethan Mollick's work. It's part of the reason why, you know, I myself, like, you know, when I was on, uh, Dax Shepard's

• 17:01Reid Hoffman?

  podcast, uh, you know, Armchair Expert, I was like, okay, let me pull out my phone and let me show you how to prompt the phone to start doing this in ways that are useful to you. Because that's actually in fact, part of how we all shape the future more collectively.

• 17:15Aria Finger?

  Well, what would you say though? Just last week, the news from Dario, the CEO of Anthropic, was that he said that they'd be rolling out AI coworkers as soon as 2026. You think that's exaggeration? You think they're going to be doing parts of roles? Or do you think that's real? That we're going to have AI coworkers coming as soon as, you know, a year from now?

• 17:35Reid Hoffman?

  Well, it depends. Coworker can mean a lot of different things, so. In a sense, with a fuzzy definition of coworker, I think.

• 17:43Aria Finger?

  It could be a co-pilot. Yeah.

• 17:45Reid Hoffman?

  Yes, exactly. It's, it's like we have co-pilots today. Right. So.

• 17:49Aria Finger?

  Right.

• 17:49Reid Hoffman?

  Now, what he means, of course, is that, and not a surprise, co-pilots will continue to improve. And what I think he also means is, unlike the, hey, I have, I'm helping guide each step. I might be able, because just like chain of thought thinking, you know, with the O1 models and others, is I send it out on a task, like a set of work, and it comes back with all the work done. Right? Like it kind of, it guided through it, changes plans some, et cetera, et cetera. And that's obviously what we see being developed already now. But again, you say, well, that's a coworker that's more robust than the current co-pilots. But it's also not a coworker in that the, you know, hey, Ari, I've got this really cool project. Hey, I'll talk to you in two or three weeks about it.

• 18:34Reid Hoffman?

  You know, and you're off assembling the resources, doing all this stuff. So it's like, this is a whole continuum. So will we be advancing the continuum? Guaranteed.

• 18:42Aria Finger?

  Absolutely.

• 18:42Reid Hoffman?

  Now, one of the things this gets to is, there's a lot of dispute around, like part of what AGI kind of means intuitively is, is it a capable independent agent in the way that a human being is a capable independent agent? It has context awareness, can change its goal sets, can remake plans and triage based on new data, can defend itself. It's like, well, no, I, Ari, I asked you to work on this book thing and you came back with this really interesting art project. Like, why, why is that? And it's like, well, no, no, but this is the reason I, when we were talking about, like what we were trying to accomplish, this suddenly turned into the really interesting thing.

• 19:17Aria Finger?

  I changed my mind. I didn't just listen to you. I like, based on my own goals and what I know about what's going on, right? You have some agency. Yeah.

• 19:24Reid Hoffman?

  Yes. And so the question is, is where are we heading towards that? Uh, and the answer is more, but how much more? And, and I tend to think that these is kind of two theories of kind of what is the next, call it five, 10, 20 years of agents look like. And 20 is like, you know, impossibly long and these things. Most people are trying to talk two years. But it's like, well, is it a progressing set of savants where it does amazing, amazing things? But part of the reason why you stay close to it is because occasionally it fucks up in like, like stunning ways that literally, like if a human did it, you'd be like, what were you thinking?

• 20:02Aria Finger?

  Right.

• 20:02Reid Hoffman?

  Like, what happened?

• 20:03Aria Finger?

  I mean, as you often say, like predicting the future, even a year or two out right now with AI is, is pretty impossible.

• 20:11Reid Hoffman?

  Which, by the way, just for, just for everyone else, a lot of people's natural response is to go, oh, shit, you can't predict the year out. That's terrifying. Hence, all the super agency, you know, doomer, gloomer. But actually, in fact, it's super interesting, and we can help shape it. That's what's great. Like, do, you know, navigate risk, concern. But it's exciting as well.

• 20:32Aria Finger?

  Absolutely.

• 20:40Reid Hoffman?

  Possible is produced by Wonder 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.

• 21:03Aria Finger?

  Special thanks to Surya Yala Manchili, Sayida Sepieva, Thanasie Dilos, Ian Alice, Greg Viato, Parth Patel, and Ben Relis.