Reid riffs on acquihires, agents, and new startup norms

What’s the deal with hyperscalers’ recent string of acquisitions betting big on AI talent? When will business schools start requiring classes on managing agents? And how is—and isn’t—AI changing the path to scale and the future of work? Aria asks Reid about all of this and more in a special two-part Riff, recorded for a live audience of AI leaders and founders in New York City in partnership with Village Global in June. Special thanks to our friends at Village Global for co-hosting this Live Reid Riffs. Tune in next week for Part II of the conversation. 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.

• 0:02Reid Hoffman?

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

• 0:12Aria Finger?

  Hey there, Possible listeners. This week's episode is a little different. On June 24th, we hosted a live version of Reid Riffs in New York City in partnership with Village Global. Reid and I did our usual back and forth, but this time in front of a live audience. And then we got into some listener and audience questions. This week, in part one, we're sharing my live conversation with Reid. And next week, we'll dig into those listener questions. So without further ado, here is Reid Riffs live.

• 0:43Aria Finger?

  So I think we're going to start off with the hardest question. One of the things Reid always says is anytime someone says, oh, here's what's going to happen in 10 years, they're probably an idiot. It's really hard to predict things that are 10 years in the future. But I feel like all of the time on Twitter, people are always saying, don't build for the AI we have today. Build for the AI that we have tomorrow. This is moving so quickly. You need to anticipate where AI is going to be, and you need to build for that. But how do we correctly anticipate what tomorrow is? Is it the AI of next week, the AI of next month, a year? And I know this is an impossible question because it matters the sector. Is it SaaS? Is it consumer? But just give us a little idea. What AI should we be building for?

• 1:28Reid Hoffman?

  And two hours later, we finished the answer to question number one.

• 1:31Aria Finger?

  Oh, yeah, Reid, 30 second answers, please.

• 1:35Reid Hoffman?

  And so, look, you know, as the question well sets out, part of the question, what you have to look at is the classic kind of startup things, which is, what is the zone in which your competitors are operating in? What is the zone in which the, the speed, in which technology, AI in this case, is changing for this? What is your go-to-market strategy? There's a set of those things. And so the answer will be different, not just on sectors, but it's also kind of a question of, you know, making some. Predictions about which of the different threads both we see currently that are iterating and improving and also which ones we see coming in and then at what speed. So for example, we all know that there is an intense amount of effort around everything that gets to do with large language models, you know, coding, text, work, productivity,

• 2:20Reid Hoffman?

  et cetera. And part of what that means is you go, so I know what it's going to be in three years. It's like, no, you probably don't. And so you really have to be dynamic and really updating quickly for that. If you're in multimodal and you're saying, well, for example, one of the things that I learned from Ethan Mollick that I thought was super interesting and many things, but as an example of where Ethan was showing that people are just not even, like are way under utilizing these tools that exist today, he said, hey, you know, like one of the difficult challenges is construction projects and like namely, is it on track? What might be running slow, et cetera, et cetera? And he literally uploaded a, the construction plan to an AI, put, I think it was like 20

• 3:03Reid Hoffman?

  cameras around it and then asked, how's it going? Like had it every day, every hour, ask how it's going and it gave a pretty accurate construction report of this was running slowly, this is how the work really ran today, et cetera, et cetera. And that, that already exists in multimodal, but multimodal is probably one of the ones where, you know, where it's, um, cause you know, error rates and all the rest and where does that matter? And, you know, inspection, like, like a monitoring thing, you know, you could be wrong and you can go check it and so forth. So it's one of the things, but multimodals in the middle. And then you've got things that are a little bit longer out, which is, um, even though people are intensely doing science and everything else, it might be the, where will the various forms of science acceleration models happen?

• 3:46Reid Hoffman?

  And so you get all of that factor, but a lot of it's the kind of classic, you know, what's the speed of the competition? Like a lot of entrepreneurship is about competition, not usually the mistake of thinking it's, it's pure competition with the large players. Usually it's other startups and, you know, how many of them, are they on the same path you are? What does it go to market? What is the defensibility of the thing that you establish once you're there? And all of that plays into and the the timing on the AI model and projectory of where the hockey puck is moving to depends on that.

• 4:20Aria Finger?

  Can I just pick up on one thing? We have a lot of founders in the room. You said the mistake that some people make is they think the startups are competing with incumbents, but they're really competing with other startups. Say a bit more on that.

• 4:30Reid Hoffman?

  Well, so mostly all organizations, small, large, have, you know, call it a small number of priorities. You know, the memory thing is most people can remember seven plus or minus two things with a little bit of an emphasis on minus two.

• 4:47Reid Hoffman?

  And, you know, organization tends to be like three things, plus or minus two things. And so, for example, if you're trying to do is, hey, hey, I'm gonna go build a new, call it, you know, office product suite, and I'm gonna do it that way, and I'm gonna go to market. You're gonna have a challenge because the giants are actually, in fact, really fighting with you on this. It's like, I'm gonna do desktop search. Now, by the way, of course, like one of the things, if you haven't started experimenting with putting the chat G P D plugin to interrupt your search and do it, you should, you learn interesting things from it in terms of where it's ready, where it's not, and all the rest. But, you know, the typical thing is, is like, well, does Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple have a small group working on your startup project?

• 5:31Reid Hoffman?

  Yes, they probably do, and who cares, right? Depending on if it's not one of the three plus or minus two things that the organization is doing. And so, as a matter of fact, it's almost like a little bit of validation if you say, hey, I'm working on this thing, and and there's a group at hyperscaler X is doing it. Now, the asterisk, the reason why, that's the general software startup advice. My asterisk is a little bit of, there's also, there's an intensity to the play here. In how AI software is constructed. That involves scale compute, scale data, scale teams. And it doesn't mean that startups can't do their own models and can't be doing things. But if you're, if you're suddenly in the, I have to be playing scale across those vectors.

• 6:16Reid Hoffman?

  Then all of a sudden you have a, you better have a good strategy of the game there.

• 6:21Aria Finger?

  So let's talk about those hyperscalers. Let's zoom out. In recent weeks, it's been a little nuts. We had Meta's investment in Scale AI, the 49%. We had OpenAI pay $6 billion for Johnny Ive startup. There's talk of Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, Aqua Hire to go sort of be the Meta dream team. Is this like a new era in the AI world where in the past we had acquisitions? And now we care more about talent than we do about product? Is this a new wave or is it, is it just a blip that we're seeing?

• 6:55Reid Hoffman?

  Well, it's a new wave, partially occasioned by what I have, in a couple of different ways, said is a overly aggressive FTC. Where the notion is we're trying to prevent future issues that look like monopolies versus current ones. And so that kind of thing is actually very anti-business, very anti-venture, very anti-constrained. And that required a bunch of innovation for some new deal types. So it's new deal types of now, I think, been definitively added. But, you know, not having been anywhere in the room and having any specific, you know, intelligence.

• 7:39Reid Hoffman?

  But I suspect that if Meta thought that they could have just bought scale, they would have just bought scale. It's much simpler, doesn't require all this, other sorts of things. Now, there are a couple of footnotes in these deals that are interesting. The basic thought is we're in the largest technological revolution that we've had in human history. That the outcomes will create companies that are in the tens, hundreds and billions, and even, now we say trillions of dollars in value. And so key talent might actually in fact be worth, you know, not just millions, but tens of millions, hundreds of millions, and maybe even billions in order to do that. And that still fits within the envelope of how,

• 8:21Reid Hoffman?

  you know, talent is generally valued within companies because the framework is usually like, you know, if I pay you, you know, $10 million because I'm expecting to make $100 million off the platform in terms of doing it. And that's part of how shareholder value, collective value in the company and all the rest of the stuff is built. But even with that, because of the anticipation of value is so high within some of these AI companies, that that's, that's the bets that are being made and it's not crazy.

• 8:48Aria Finger?

  Should the people in this room do anything different? Like, obviously, there's still the path to IPO and the IPO market is opening up a bit. But do you build any differently when you're expecting this path versus a pure acquisition?

• 8:59Reid Hoffman?

  You know, I was actually just, just before this, talking to, you know, one of my partners who works here in, in New York, Seth Rosenberg at Greylock. And I was just talking to him about this. And that part of the thing is to say, you always build for a eternal company, right? You build for, it's going to go public, it's going to be big, it's going to change the industry. And you change other things based on it. Now, the pattern of how you're building might be, might change. Because the pattern of how you're, you're, you're building might be like, okay, for example, one of the things that's a near certainty is within a small end number of years, could be as small as

• 9:41Reid Hoffman?

  two, could be as great as five, that if you're a professional and you're deploying and you're not deploying with multiple agents, what you're doing, you're undertooled. It's a little bit like saying, you know, I'm a graphic designer and I don't use Figma or Photoshop. Whereas like, no, not really. You're not a graphic designer. You might be something else, but you're not a graphic designer. And so, or I'm a professional, I don't use, I have neither a computer nor a smartphone. You know, like, you know, it's like, no, no, that doesn't really work that way. And so, like, that will be intensely there. And that will change certain patterns. Like, for example, one of the things that we've got classically within management is this notion of, you know, there's like, you know, individual contributors

• 10:25Reid Hoffman?

  and there's manager plus doers and there's managers of doers and then there's executives of managers and so on. And when you go all the way down to the individual contributors in this universe, you know, here's an interesting question. I won't make a prediction as per your earlier thing, but when will MBAs start, uh, business schools start teaching classes on how you manage agents, right? Because each individual contributor will have to have a managing agents as part of their skill set.

• 10:53Aria Finger?

  I thought you were gonna say, when is the MBA gonna become irrelevant? And perhaps the answer was 10 years ago.

• 11:00Reid Hoffman?

  Well, I usually say that my, my degree in philosophy is more relevant than, than an MBA.

• 11:07Aria Finger?

  Exactly, exactly. The philosopher entrepreneur. Okay, so gonna go back to, all right, if we're building today, we need to think about the AI of tomorrow. Everyone's talking about what your moats are. It's like, it used to be, was it network, was it product? Today, it's like the magic of AI. You think something's great, and then next week, it's just table stakes. So in this new era, is it a proprietary feedback loop, your distribution wedge? Like, what is the moat that these companies should be looking for?

• 11:35Reid Hoffman?

  Well, so first, is most of the classic moats still apply? You know, you get a, integrated into an enterprise workflow, and part of what happens, that's, that's a defense. You have a network effect of, you know, of multiple sorts. And most people, of course, think network effects, they think LinkedIn and, you know, Facebook.

• 11:55Aria Finger?

  Never heard of it.

• 11:56Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, whatever. This, this is a small company. And so, you know, they, they kind of think all those things. But there's also various forms. For example, one of the very original network effects in modern software was in Microsoft's Office product suite between the data file formats and the, and the application. So there's lots of different places. And, and one of the, of course, key things to look at is, you know, where might there be network effects? Because they're one of the really key things that happen. Where might there be network effects that are new patterns within the AI thing? And, and most of the pitches that I've seen on that so far are More kind of impressionistic, you know, Jackson Pollock-ish than systematic. But, but you know, I think there will be some.

• 12:39Reid Hoffman?

  Obviously, you know, some part of the question is, you know, as you're solving certain kinds of problems, certain kinds of data set that really align to that will be very relevant because, you know, surprisingly, large models, GPT-4, Gemini, Copilot, et cetera, can actually do a fair amount of medical stuff because there's just so much content out there on the internet. But as you begin to get to more, kind of more specific things like, okay, drug therapy, you know, and reactions, the data sets on those things actually in fact really matter. So there'll be various things on data sets. And so there will be some new patterns and obviously one of the patterns that the hyperscalers in particular focused on is scale compute.

• 13:24Reid Hoffman?

  You know, we're still not quite sure where the scale compute really starts delivering sharply asymptotic value. It's not to say that there won't be and all the rest and that's actually one of the questions that get into all the discussions of this. And by the way, sometimes, you know, as you get to different orders of level of magnitude, getting the models to, to, you know, kind of congeal, can come together in the right way, actually has some added difficulty. It's not just, you know, apply, you know, 300,000 more H100s and everything is great. There's ways to try to make that happen effectively. But like, but that's another one and that's actually one of the things that makes the

• 14:07Reid Hoffman?

  software game a little different because you say, well, actually in fact, I've got a self-learning system that creates the real competitive advantage, but you actually have to have, you know, X hundred thousand H100s in order to do that, then that's like less of a startup game and more of a, more of a hyperscaler game. When you include like OpenAI and Anthropic and other folks in the hyperscalers.

• 14:29Aria Finger?

  So, speaking of LinkedIn, which does have six times the revenue of Twitter, not that anyone asked, but just for the record, annually, you launched LinkedIn over twenty years ago, and you had your co-founders, you had your first few hires. How does that look different than how AI teams should look today? Is it just less people? Is it mostly engineers? Do you wait a long time for that first business hire because you can do so much with ChatGPT? How is that different from twenty years ago?

• 15:00Reid Hoffman?

  If you're starting a company from scratch and everyone in the company is not using AI aggressively, I mean, anyone who's not using AI aggressively, and I call it a seed or a series A company, I think you probably want to get rid of them. And if you're the founder, then get rid of yourself. So it's like, because, you know, it's where the puck is moving to and all the rest and understanding it. It doesn't mean it'll be perfect for everything, doesn't mean it should be used for everything, but that kind of cycle. And that means you'll have an amplification of productivity across the entire set. And so it allows a few new corner cases, like, for example, like, maybe the cost of, as opposed to, oh, our minimum

• 15:40Reid Hoffman?

  viable thing, like, roughly speaking, I started LinkedIn, kind of called the minimum viable company to really get stuff going was like, kind of in the ten to fifteen people, like, you know, when Wey Graylock led the round on Instagram, it was twelve employees, right, as an instance. And so, you know, that is like, that's kind of the set. And maybe that's now six people, or five people, or three people, you know, as kind of, you know, how that plays out. And maybe what you can do with one person is now much more amazing. And so there's some weird corner cases. But on the other hand, this is relatively small, like, and so, by the way, people can't otherwise get seed capital, or national can start early,

• 16:21Reid Hoffman?

  you know, mean things for universities and university projects, you know, doing things. And so all of that opens up, and then I'll be very good. On the other hand, once you get into the kind of venture line, you know, the difference between funding fifteen people and seven people is not that big of a difference, or fifteen and twenty-five people is not that big of a difference. And so I think it'll be less like, oh, it's we're not just now doing a lot more with the people. And I think that will be a plan. And I so I think it'll probably be, you know, like getting to the blitzscaling, you know, kind of phenomena like the speed of motion is now in many cases, especially when you have a small team is going to be absolutely important. The question of, you know, will people be fast following your particular go to market motion, you know, that's going to be relevant.

• 17:05Reid Hoffman?

  So there's going to be a whole stack of kind of new patterns here. And by the way, in this regard, while there's new patterns, it's not like, oh, AI is the only time of new patterns have happened. I mean, part of the thing that between my first startup, SocialNet and PayPal and then LinkedIn, is kind of like, how much do you have to have sun equipment, right? And Unix boxes that you're doing on prem is just going down to the floor. Like probably a lot of people here are like, what's a sun box? Anyway, but you know, like, so, so it's a new set of tools, a new set of play, but, but that's not unheard of to change the game and the software game.

• 17:41Aria Finger?

  Sounds like you're saying you're, we're still going to need these or perhaps not need, but once we get into the venture space, yeah, you're still going to have 15 employees. You know, you'll start at six, you'll get to 15, you're just going to move more quickly. And so maybe that means that you're going to get to revenue more quickly or more revenue more quickly. So from the venture side, I mean, we've seen some eye popping seed rounds lately, but forget sort of the, the Miramarades and the, the, um, the one offs. Is venture just going to be investing earlier or they're going to investing with more revenue and at the same stage? Like, how does that change in the age of AI or the age of quicker work and, you know, more, um, just the speed is going up so fast?

• 18:21Reid Hoffman?

  Well, I think there will be, cry me a river for the, for VCs, even though we're here with Village and, you know, Seth's in the audience and all the rest. It'll be harder because you can possibly blink and miss it more quickly. And so speed of decisioning, speed of, you know, making an offer, taking risks before.

• 18:41Reid Hoffman?

  There's supertraction, etc. I mean, you tend to get this kind of barbell approach where like either you have to go seed or you have to go growth. And the intermediate becomes kind of to some degree harder. Now, seed's always somewhat hard because you're like, okay, will they figure out kind of product market fit? Will they figure out something that will get to scale product market fit? And then in growth, a lot of it's kind of like, okay, well, how big does this get? And is it going to work? And then, you know, one of the things that frequently, once upon a time, Silicon Valley was very derided from, and I think now is no longer, is you're not just taking product market fit risk or entrepreneur risk or competitive risk, but actually sometimes you take business model risk. And I suspect that one of the things we're going to see a lot of, kind of like, almost

• 19:24Reid Hoffman?

  like the parallel from the early internet to now with AI, is we'll see a lot of business model risk.

• 19:40Aria Finger?

  So we're going to switch gears. My coworker, Thanasi, put this question in the question set because he knows what a huge fan of crypto I am. So here we are. We're going to talk crypto resurgence. Regulators have a changed posture towards crypto with the new administration. We saw Circle IPO. It's up 620%, I think, as of today. And, you know, crypto prices are still wildly swinging. Perhaps it's just, we're just looking at memes to see what's going to happen. But there's also the Genius Act, which passed the Senate and is waiting to pass the House. And they're going to, you know, insert some regulation into the crypto market so this

• 20:24Aria Finger?

  can be a stable financial game or not. Or are meme coins going to continue to run the show?

• 20:30Reid Hoffman?

  Well, you know, as you know, usually when you say A or B, I say mix, both, you know, etc. Matter of fact, I think it was Ben Kessnoka from Village who said, you know, your tagline should be nuance. It was kind of a fun observation. So, look, one, Genius Act, great. Because actually, in fact, you know, getting to more frameworks in which, you know, there's kind of clarity of regulatory space for entrepreneurs to act in, for financial system to interact with, to be clear between those is actually, in fact, a really good thing. I think that's a very strong set of progress. You know, generally speaking. You know, kind of the pattern should be is like, look, what's the way that we should bring it into the financial system?

• 21:15Reid Hoffman?

  What are the kind of regulatory controls for whatever your particular concern is? And what should you be doing relative to that regulatory concern is the thing to be generally doing versus, you know, kind of the just hit with stick, which was one of the failure points of the previous administration. You know, I think that's a very, very good thing. And I do think that, you know, when you get to, for example, stable coins with the Genius Act and the one, the balancing with the dollars, it's actually good for the overall dollar ecosystem. It's good for actually the world, because a lot of different places, you know, can use stable coins now for financial trading systems, whether it's Venezuela or any other place, and I think that's a very good thing.

• 21:57Reid Hoffman?

  But there's still a long way to go in terms of what all the use cases that people are describing, whether or not it's digital identity, you know, digitization of assets, you know, kind of scarce digital commodities, all the rest. And of course, we will have lots of memes. And they may even be named after a president, who knows?

• 22:18Aria Finger?

  Who knows? Who knows?

• 22:20Reid Hoffman?

  Terish that thought. It's a science fiction universe.

• 22:22Aria Finger?

  So, as we said, you are a philosopher entrepreneur. You got your master's in philosophy, not an MBA. And so, switching to a more philosophical question, one of the things that people worry about in the age of AI is losing meaning, losing purpose, whether it's because people think there won't be jobs, so people won't have careers to give them purpose. I don't know, if we don't do the dishes every day, how are we gonna find our purpose with AI, AI creating video and content and creativity? And so, what do you think about the direction that AI is heading in as it relates to sort of human creativity, flourishing, purpose? Could we go down the wrong path? Or you're convinced that we're still on the right track?

• 23:07Aria Finger?

  A or B, please?

• 23:08Reid Hoffman?

  Well, if it was A or B, as you know from Super Agency, which I published over this year, I would say we're on the right track. Now, your setup of the question actually led me to think you were gonna do one of these tweets that I really love from last year, year before, which is, "I wanted AI to do the dishes so I could do poetry, not AI that did poetry so I can do the dishes more."

• 23:28Aria Finger?

  I literally was thinking about that.

• 23:30Reid Hoffman?

  Yes, it sounded like that as you were asking the question. I am ultimately very positive on

• 23:38Reid Hoffman?

  Uh, human beings' ability to kind of figure out how to have a, we operate as a tribe and have a, you know, kind of meaningfulness society. Transitions can be super painful, super difficult, and we might really fuck up the transitions. And we can really fuck them up. I mean, for example, you know, take in China, the Cultural Revolution, but many other circumstances where you can actually just deliberately really, really screw stuff, screw stuff up and, and you know, like Venezuela today, you know, like lots of good oil and totally dysfunctional society. So it's totally doable. And that's one of the reasons why to put a lot of energy into steer and all the rest. But that being said, like, we've kind of run, like, like if you look at a bunch of the medieval countries, including Europe,

• 24:23Reid Hoffman?

  if you get to the point where like, you know, for example, AI robots are doing all the work, that's essentially like, well, that's what the nobility were living like when they had all the peasants and serfs and all the rest and, and so, you know, like you have dinner parties and, you know, have poetry recitals and is, you know, Bob talking to Sarah and is Sarah still friends with Michelle and, you know, does Michelle regard Bob?

• 24:47Aria Finger?

  So read things gossip is really going to increase in the age of AI. I like that take.

• 24:51Reid Hoffman?

  Well, it's social. It's an interesting kind of social thing. And so, so I'm convinced, like, we find meaning in how we interact with each other, what our positions in society are. Sure, sometimes it can be, does this person get promoted, gives a higher salary, kind of classic work stuff. But it's also, is this person invited to the party, you know, etc. And so I think all of that, I, I, I'm not ultimately, like, for example, part of raising why people find a crisis of meaning is they go, well, this thing that I was really good at now gets outmoded. And so, for example, this thing I was really good at, which is I was a human calculator, you know, kind of keeping the accounting books and then, you know, spreadsheets come along. And that's not relevant anymore. But like, accounting didn't go away, right? Accounting now became other things.

• 25:36Reid Hoffman?

  King, you know, scenario planning and strategic analysis. He's, well, AI can do that. It's like, okay, but maybe it's like cross checking it or training it or or managing it or running scenarios of, well, here is the, like, for example, because this is like agents is like, okay, like, I think one of the things you'll see more of is, well, run five different plans and compare them with each other.

• 25:57Aria Finger?

  Mm hmm.

• 25:58Reid Hoffman?

  Right? Because which are outside of our bandwidth now, but like, if you said, okay, I'm going to have this group of agents doing that, this group of agents, this group.

• 26:03Aria Finger?

  Everyone's a manager.

• 26:05Reid Hoffman?

  Yes, as kind of instance doing. And so I'm both, you know, bullish, I'll stay the course, super agency on, even if we get to the Star Trek, you know, kind of science fiction, but also, I also think people tend to overstate how quickly, you know, like, work's going away. Um, you know, I, I teased Dari a little bit about white collar blood baths.

• 26:30Aria Finger?

  It did get a lot of headlines.

• 26:31Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah. Um, and because I actually think that the transitions will be real, and that's the thing that I think Dari was trying to emphasize, but I think human organizations and human institutions, we kind of move at the speed, we might be accelerated, might be pushed into it, but we kind of move at the speed that we need to competitively because we're kind of happy with the environment we're in. Now challengers, entrepreneurs, are always doing the new thing, the different thing, and seeing if it can stick and can seeing if that can work. And that will ultimately also pick up the pace on this stuff.

• 27:02Aria Finger?

  So a related question that we get a lot is, of course, your answer is going to be, if you're in the workplace, you have to use AI, everyone is going to have an agent, a co-pilot, doesn't matter what profession you're in. But what are the sort of more human skills that are going to be important in the age of AI?

• 27:20Reid Hoffman?

  Well, I think there's a stack of human skills that will obviously persist because to some degree. Like, I don't, uh, it'll be interesting when we kind of get to, like, for example, as, as a classic, there's an interesting hypothesis of, um, I, I'm certain that we will have some AI artists that we will care about in kind of some version. But we might very well have like a few and mostly still just care about human artists. And you say, well, wait, this song, this painting, the sculpture was produced so much more with precision and fine and craft by the AI. It's like, no, but I'm interested in what other human beings are doing.

• 28:03Reid Hoffman?

  And so that, what other human beings are doing, we are, Aristotle said, we're citizens of the polis, political animals, but it really means kind of like social, like we're, we're citizens of the village, the city, et cetera, the tribe. And so we really care about what other people are, uh, doing and saying and what our relationship with them. That's part of the earlier kind of like finding meaning and whatnot. And so all the skills to go with that persist.

• 28:28Aria Finger?

  Mm hmm.

• 28:28Reid Hoffman?

  Um, and you say, well, do we care about doing, you know, thinking scientifically, mathematically, et cetera? I think the answer will be yes, and not just because even if you say, hey, look, this curve is not going to asymptote, uh, ultimately, these devices will be much, much better than us overall, like, but it's still actually, in fact, can be useful because it's like cross-checking, understanding, being able to participate and under, and like know where to be in what's happening with the world of AI. In part because like, for example, today, we all know that part of the creative force of these things also creates hallucination. And being able to be aware of, well, did it matter in this circumstance?

• 29:10Reid Hoffman?

  And so, anyway, so, look, yes, all these classic human skills, but I don't think the other skills, I think they change shape. I don't think they go away. Just, it's a similar like thing. Hey, what I'm really good at is you get, you say, what is 112 times 276? And some people go, I got you an answer right now. And other people go, I pulled out my smartphone. It's fine, right? It's like, so that it, it, it changes in terms of, of how those.

• 29:34Aria Finger?

  If no one's taking computer science right now, who's going to train and tune the models in 20 years? Like, we absolutely still need expertise.

• 29:40Reid Hoffman?

  And part of computer science, like, here's, here's a more. Interesting depth point of view, which is every profession will evolve to the point where part of that agents that you're managing, one or more of them will be software construction agents, right? So the way that you operate as a professional, anything from accountant, lawyer, doctor, teacher, you know, small business owner, etc. You'll actually be thinking in software patterns in part because that will be the way that you elaborate what your business is. And maybe a lot of those software patterns will be scripting, etc. But that's an inevitable truth. That's a computer science way of thinking.

• 30:24Reid Hoffman?

  And by the way, that doesn't mean that that's the only computer science thinking because, you know, the question around like, you know, there's all kinds, like, for example, today you got vibe coding, it's very cool. If someone came to me and said, I'm vibe coding the efficiency of my hyperscaling server stack, I'd be like, oh, have someone else invest in you and that'll mean how it goes.

• 30:44Aria Finger?

  You'll pass. Wishing you the best.

• 30:47Reid Hoffman?

  Yes. And that will change, but that's today.

• 30:49Aria Finger?

  So we have a lot of founders in here who are focused on AI and healthcare. And I've been lucky enough to have a front row seat to the company you co-founded called Manus AI. And to me, healthcare-

• 31:02Reid Hoffman?

  Which is based here in New York.

• 31:03Aria Finger?

  Which is based here in New York, the capital of AI, I would say. I haven't really heard of any other cities who do it better. So based here in New York.

• 31:13Reid Hoffman?

  Maybe five, but yes.

• 31:15Aria Finger?

  So one of the things I'm most excited about with AI is just the enormous propensity to save human life, stop human suffering, get rid of terrible paperwork as it relates to when you go to the doctor's office. Give us, tell us what you're most excited about as it relates to AI and healthcare. Feel free to talk about what you're doing at Manus. It's been, it's been really exciting to watch.

• 31:37Reid Hoffman?

  Well, I'm gonna only say three things. I think it's one of the things that really matters. The first is, and I won't say the, the name because I haven't gotten permission from this entrepreneur, but this entrepreneur was hiking with a cousin of his. They went to a local hospital because the cousin was having some problems. The local hospital said, oh, you're fine. You know, take a couple Advil. Uh, my friend checked ChatGPT in this case. And the ChatGPT said, take him to another hospital. And took him to another hospital and the prognosis was if you got near two hours later, he'd be dead. So second opinion, right? Yep.

• 32:17Reid Hoffman?

  It's a very good thing to use as a second opinion, even today. Doesn't mean first opinion when and how and so that doesn't mean it's it's always wrong in a first opinion. Sure. But as a second opinion, killer. Cause second opinion will in part will tell you, you know, should I get a third? Uh, the second thing is, um, I think that the notion of like part of the thing, like, yes, we're gonna have all of these, you know, kind of transition issues and workforce and so forth. And people are like, why should we have to do that? I'm very happy with where I am. Why should the technologists be allowed to do this? Common discussion thread, et cetera, et cetera. And it's like, well, look, actually, in fact, we have line of sight to a medical assistant that's better than today's average, you know, today's GP.

• 33:02Reid Hoffman?

  That's available 24 seven, that can run for less than $5 an hour. Legal assistant, education tutor, et cetera. And the human elevation across all of that is simply worth a massive amount of transition. And we should be getting that. And so, and like part of what you can imagine, like I think this is a trivial part of how healthcare will evolve is very rarely will you go up and say, hey, Ari, you're my doctor, start talking to me about this. It'll be when I show up, it'll be the, okay, give permission for your agent to talk to my agent. Download all that. Now let's go into that because I've already been interacting with my agent. And by the way, when I'm in single payer systems like NHS or others,

• 33:45Reid Hoffman?

  that can be part of the whole triage. Like, you know, medical care always has to be rationed. You can't afford infinite any, everything for everyone. That's part of the having an economy. But today, it's kind of blunt force. It's like you have some concern and you're not going to the emergency room. Fine, we'll schedule you for six weeks because you're in the queue. Well, some people should be never in the queue whatsoever. Some people should be showing up today at the emergency room, you know, this minute, and then everything in between.

• 34:11Aria Finger?

  Efficiency gains are enormous.

• 34:13Reid Hoffman?

  But the efficiency gains, allocation of resources, all the rest, helping you with the other things. So it's not just kind of a, hey, you know, is this rash something? Or, or, you know, can I take ibuprofen when I'm on this drug? Or other kinds of things which you can actually already do as part of the 101 medical assistant stuff, but like that kind of thing. And then, and then you of course get to Manis, which is, you know, part of, and actually, you know, I was having a discussion with a bunch of my partners at Greylock and including Seth, and we were, I was saying, look, I think there's going to be a whole bunch of work productivity stuff that's going to be really interesting. I think there'll be some consumer stuff that will surprise all of us that we need to look for. I think there'll be coding agents, et cetera, et cetera, all of which are great.

• 34:57Reid Hoffman?

  I'm happy to help. But what I think one of the places that we have is a blind spot is when it's not just pure CS and it's CS plus other things. Now, obviously, sometimes it gets into robotics and one of the products happen and, you know, there's a whole thread we can talk about there. But it was like, but like, for example, drug discovery, right? It is, it's, it's kind of when you go atoms and bits, you know, kind of biological are kind of in the middle and it's closest to the zone of bits and what you're doing in software. I think there'll be a ton of stuff here. But the problem is you can't just do it. Like a lot of CS people think, oh, you do it all in simulation. They think, oh, you just create an AI drug researcher and press play plus 100 play. And it's like.

• 35:41Aria Finger?

  You need a wet lab. You need things to work in the real world.

• 35:43Reid Hoffman?

  And you need to understand kind of what this data set is and how this works and configure. But these new tools are simply stunning, not obviously just the recent Nobel prizes. But in terms of how this plays. And so I think drug discovery. And so, you know, I'm part of how when I start thinking about these things, I go start talking to the smartest people I know. Siddhartha Mukherjee was one of them. And I was actually having dinner with him here in New York. And he, I kind of ran him through this, oh, that's a really good thesis. And I said, and I was like, great. And it's like, because, you know, I had known Sid not just as the brother-in-law, one of our partners, David Z, not just as the celebrated author, Pulitzer Prize-winning Emperor of

• 36:24Reid Hoffman?

  All Maladies, a bunch of other books, not just as one of the most famous, smart cancer doctors on the planet, professor of oncology at Columbia. But those are the things I know. And as a friend, this is new to me, and he says, well, you know, I've actually brought drugs to market. And I'm like, what? He's like, yeah, I've helped start up a number of different companies. This sounds great. Let's talk about this. And so I got a literally crash course of hours and hours and hours of what the drug discovery process looks like. And part of what we were doing is bouncing back and forth between, okay, this is what AI today looks like, this is why probably AI in one year and three years, here's some of the tools that everyone knows about, here's some of the tools that very few people know about, where can they make a difference in each of these places, you know, and what kinds of things to do.

• 37:07Reid Hoffman?

  And that's part of how Manus got started.

• 37:10Aria Finger?

  Well, and the mission of Manus is to use AI to cure cancers.

• 37:15Reid Hoffman?

  And this was Sid's fundamental thing, because, you know, part of the thing is he's like, look, cancer kills everybody, all age groups, et cetera, and it's fatal. And our current attempts at therapy are brutal. And if we could do it this way, massive unlock of value for everybody.

• 37:37Reid 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 Allard, Tanasi Delos, Sarah Schlead, Vanessa Handy, Elia Yates, Paloma Moreno Jimenez, and Mulia Agudelo. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.

• 38:00Aria Finger?

  Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saieda Sapieva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patel, and Ben Ralas. And a big thanks to Jennifer Whiting, Sheila Goodman, Ben Casnoca, and the whole Village Global team. Robert Kingsley, Jerry Madlumbaya, Samuel Henriquez, The Ritz-Carlton, and of course, Vincent Lucero.