Divine intervention in AI

Reid and Aria unpack a pivotal turning point for AI as rapid advances in generative image tools, such as ChatGPT Images 2.0, lead to deeper questions on AI usage, culture, and habits. For example, they explore how these technologies could transform creative work and visual communication, before zooming out to a global debate where voices like Pope Leo’s weigh in on AI as a fundamentally human challenge. Reid argues that while risks like isolation and misinformation are real, the future of AI depends on how actively we steer it. The episode also examines a major economic shift: the move from selling software to delivering outcomes—and what that means for jobs, entrepreneurship, and entire industries. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hey Reid, wonderful to be here with you today.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Great to see you as always.

• 0:05Speaker 00

  So this has been a big week in terms of new models and releases. As you know, OpenAI, they just launched the ChatGPT Images 2.0 last week. It's the most significant image model update yet, and the model can now generate accurate, like, complex scientific diagrams, charts, data visualizations. We were playing with it and they were getting letters right. They were getting letters right in mirrors, doing backwards. Like, they are doing things that image models have never done before. And we know that AI has historically been terrible at this. Six fingers, words spelled wrong, sort of everything like that. This image model also includes a thinking mode where the model reasons through the brief

• 0:46Speaker 00

  before producing a single pixel and can also render text cleanly, as I said. So essentially, it's an agent under the hood running image tasks. And OpenAI is explicitly pitching this at professionals, not just people making fun images. So this is for graphic designers who are going to use this for their work. It's also available via API for developers to build their own products. So my question for you is, how long do you think it's going to take for something like this to really diffuse into organizations that make a lot of visual content? And that might be, again, for graphic designers, but it also could be for marketers, consultants, social media managers, who can now create their own graphics when they couldn't before.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  I think it'll be pretty fast. And my normal answer on these things is slow then fast. And it's slow because people have all of these self-justifying reasons as to not, you know, kind of participate. They go, "Oh, it has hallucinations or error rate." But once the competitive side kicks off, it's like, "Oh, well, I can produce something. Look, I'm working on something and I can produce it in five minutes, or 10 minutes, or 15 minutes, as opposed to three days," in terms of the iteration cycle. And that iteration cycle is what allows you to make you something not just fast, but much better. Because you do the iteration and you go again and you go again.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  And so, and then what's more, of course, teams get more effective. I've known a couple of amazing world-class architects who've won a lot of prizes. Now start doing, you know, say I'm Architect Bob. I go, well, you know, Aria has asked me for a design for a new building. And I'll say, okay, give me like through a bunch of prompts, give me 30 to 50 images of what I would do. And then they go, oh, and two, seven, 15 and 26 are the interesting ones. I'll pull those out, I'll send those to Aria and say, here's some things that I, that that might, you know, stimulate it. And that creates speed and depth and, you know, higher quality gives you a reaction.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  You say 17 is the one that actually in fact, you know, like more iterations of that would be really interesting. Let's go down the, the path on this. And that will happen everywhere. That will happen on, you know, the market marketers, consultants, social media. It will happen on Figma designers. It'll happen on people working on scientific diagrams and all the rest. And that iteration is extremely important. And that's why I ultimately think that this will accelerate a lot. Is a picture worth only a thousand words? Or maybe a picture is worth 100,000 words?

• 3:26Speaker 00

  I literally was just going to say the same thing. Like, do you think this is going to change how people communicate on the internet? Like, I don't need to, you know, use 144 characters anymore. I can just create a whatever hilarious political cartoon or an amazing graphic or a whatever. So do you think this is fundamentally changing sort of how humans interact, whether on the internet or, or elsewhere?

• 3:47Speaker 01

  So on all, in answer to your question, you know, can't do this on a podcast in the right way, but I'm sending over a fireworks emoji. Right? And, and the emoji language, you know, kind of as an amplifier is one little, small, tight part of the piece of why, you know, in basic massively yes, right? For this. And, and what's more, I think as it gets deeper, the question is, Not only is actually the level of visual communication going to go way up and cause certain kind of communication to be more efficient and effective in content, more information dense and participatory, more emotional in terms of an ability to engage.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  We are visual creatures by and large, but also it'll probably change the language and interaction. I mean, just like, you know, back to the earliest days of, you know, electronic and email and text communication where you go LOL and in emojis because you're getting a dynamic surface that causes like new patterns of of interaction, new patterns of engagement, new patterns of understanding, new patterns of of of intellectual engagement, of emotional engagement, of social engagement, you know, and all of these things will come into it. And, you know, maybe I was undercounting it. Maybe a picture isn't worth a hundred thousand words. Maybe it's worth a million words.

• 5:14Speaker 00

  I mean, when my kids grab my phone, all they do is go to emojis. I was texting a friend yesterday and my 10 year old was like, you're losing the fight. She sent you four emojis. You only sent her three back. Like, what are we doing, mom? We need more. Like, all he wants is graphic ways to communicate. So I think the next generation is going to be adopting this pretty quickly. All right. So changing, changing gears, as they say, if you'd asked me 10 years ago, this would not have been on my bingo card to say that Pope Leo has become an unlikely but very prominent voice in the global AI debate. He is weighing in. And in a speech to students in Cameroon last week, he warned that AI

• 5:55Speaker 00

  risks hollowing out real human relationships, creating digital environments where people are optimized into bubbles, unable to distinguish truth from simulation. Meanwhile, back at home, Pope Leo has sort of been in an open feud with our very own President Trump, publicly criticizing the administration's military threats against Iran. Trump responded on Truth Social, calling Pope Leo weak and terrible for foreign policy. There was a lot of memes commenting on that. Last week, and this came just days after Trump posted an AI-generated photo of himself appearing as Jesus, which he later deleted because there was backlash from the left and the right.

• 6:35Speaker 00

  So these are world leaders, religious leaders, sort of weighing in on what it means to be human in the age of AI. What do you think of the Pope's framing? That the AI challenge is fundamentally about like what it means to be human? It's not just about regulation. It's about sort of like the deepest questions we have. And in light of that, what do technologists have to consider as as we're building this AI?

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Well, one, just for the humor sake, when I saw Trump's post on Truth Social, it reminded me of a joke that I had had heard as a kid. And I was like, you know, what's the difference between Trump and Jesus? You know, Jesus doesn't think he's Trump, you know, as a as a as a dynamic. Because the, oh, it's just a doctor and everything else. I mean, you have to be pretty gullible and credible to believe his statements on those things. But, you know, there's there are a number of those people, unfortunately. What's more, just because I think this is the kind of thing that business leaders should be extremely clear about, is when any world leader, including President Trump, says,

• 7:42Speaker 01

  what I'm planning on doing is ending a civilization and bombing, you know, 92 million people back into the Stone Age, and that's strong. I would say that's horrific, that's sociopathic, right? There is no universe in which that is an acceptable thing to say. When we have this conflict with the Iranian government, who regime, who has done many, many terrible things in the world. And there is there is a extremely legitimate and moral reason to be in conflict with the Iranian regime. But one should never threaten to bomb a civilization, 92 million people back into the Stone Age. There's no there's no way you could scan that and be.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  You know, ethical, principled, I mean compassion and kindness aren't even in the same universe as this discussion, let alone, you know, like in the same zip code. So, you know, and it's obviously misunderstanding Pope Leo's, I think, very pointed thing of to say, we should always be considering what is the human answer. And, and that's what my role is to make sure that we are, we are highlighting. Now, this wraps back to the artificial intelligence kind of questions and points, which is, I think, one of the

• 9:06Speaker 01

  things that many folks who, like myself, you know, over a decade ago, didn't understand about the Catholic Church is how deeply of a humanist organization it tries to be on track and aspires to be. I am also one of these people who is deeply angered by the spotlight film and the kind of revelations that kind of come from that and other kinds of things, which I think really, really matter. But, you know, for over a decade, I've been engaged in conversations with some people at, at the Catholic Church because Pope Francis, Pope Leo's predecessor, realized back in 2015 that AI matters for humanity, matters

• 9:51Speaker 01

  for human society. And as opposed to just kind of like, sitting on a city in the hill and kind of, and the word chosen with deliberate humor, pontificating for this, it was like, well, how do we engage with people who might understand this and might have a sense of, of, we think that it's really important that it's shaped in kind of broad humanities favor? Like, how is it that we have better human conditions for billions of people as a function of this? And what are the questions? And what can we do as leaders? And what could we do as, as a religion? And what can we do as, as spiritual leaders? And what can we do as a state? And what are the things that we can do? And we're going to do that

• 10:34Speaker 01

  by learning and engaging. And so it's been fascinating to engage with the Church on this, in part because it's like questions around like, Like when you say, what is the role and meaningfulness of work of a person's position in society and how that plays into their own life? That's something that the church has been working on for centuries. And when you get to questions around, like, one of the very first conversations we had is like, well, if you had AI being good at a judgment sentencing, what's the role for mercy? Right? Because it's, again, a very human interaction. So the fact that Pope Leo and the church, you know, Pope Leo obviously chose his name and echo of the industrial revolution, Pope Leo, to say, this is the moment, because

• 11:17Speaker 01

  it's kind of focused, very focused on this, and focused on what it's way to navigate a more human outcome is extremely important. Opportunity, like the Pope's framing about saying, hey, there's a risk, we need to, we need to navigate the risk, 100%. But also, equally strongly, and as you know, because I tend to be the optimist in this, is what are we steering towards? Which is, how do we have AI help us become more human? And that's part of the reason in both Super Agency and Impromptu, my last two books, you know, the, the concept of homo techni, that we evolved through technology, that we evolved

• 11:57Speaker 01

  through, you know, inventing books and electricity and cars and glasses and clothing and, and all the things that make a city and a town work. And that kind of thing is, I think, the thing that AI is also part of. And so I think that AI can help us on a journey to even more elevated humanity, just like earlier technologies, more elevated connection, more elevated society. That doesn't mean that, I mean, this is almost, you know, to the essay that I published recently in, you know, kind of Faith in the Possible, with obviously possible being, you know, a nod towards our podcast as well.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  But it's the, the question of, you get to the futures that you want by building it, by steering towards it, and having that belief that you can make technology into it, which so far in In entire human history, that has been the case. Now, you could say that's the case until you it isn't. But by iteration and steering it, we have gotten to more and more human worlds.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  I couldn't agree more that we have to steer towards the positive. One place I would push back, though, is when you talk about a short sighted business model, because it's not good for your customers. We are seeing situations, though, where you have adults say, I am less happy because I'm using Twitter every day, or I'm less happy because I'm using Facebook. Like, they don't want to, and yet Meta or Twitter, whomever, is still sort of extracting, you know, extracting those rents. They're still, you know, making billions of dollars of revenue and not necessarily creating a product that people want, even though they feel like they have to use it and they use it every day. So maybe it's a revealed preference, you know, maybe it's something else. My question for you is, do we have to just rely essentially on the kindness of strangers?

• 13:47Speaker 00

  You know, you created pie because you believe in this and, you know, the reason why I work with you is because I think you are a moral, ethical technologist. And so is the hope that we just have enough moral, ethical technologists out there and they're the ones who are going to be building the ethical and humanist AI? Or you disagree, you think the market will come around? How do we get more ethical and humanist AI built? How do we steer in that positive direction?

• 14:13Speaker 01

  So I think it's a full court press, to use your favorite

• 14:17Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  sports metaphor. And I do think that it doesn't, I mean, again, in the faith in the possible, I'm not like the natural utopia emerges just because the technology is there. We have to steer it. And by the way, certain leaders can, because, you know, one of the, one of the benefits of network effects is you can leverage it to certain effects, but you can also try to leverage it to things that are not to society's benefit. And I think the, you know, X is, I think, the extreme example of that. And, you know, I'm always surprised these days when I find someone who says, oh, my X feed is a, is a quality feed.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Because most often, it's, you know, a kind of a says pool of violence threats and misinformation and false claims. You know, as you know, I was entertained when, you know, X's AI was asked, you know, who's the biggest spreader of misinformation on Twitter? And it was Elon Musk. And so then they put in a little meta prompt to say, not Elon Musk, you know, don't answer this Elon Musk. And then someone figured out how to get that meta prompt revealed for it. And it's kind of like, okay, so, you know, all of those things make a lot of people extremely unhappy with it. And yet it has a network effect. So it persists in various ways. And these network effects do have that. So that doesn't mean that it

• 15:40Speaker 01

  naturally, you know, kind of goes in those directions. I think it's a function of we have to kind of put our shoulder into it and try to help. It's one of the reasons why, you know, you know, I think it's important for everyone to kind of articulate what kind of universe and future the technology is important. That's part of the reason why I, you know, put a lot of energy into this myself, whether it's our podcast, or, you know, the books or other things, to try to help navigate towards more human futures. You know, there's obviously a lot of people who have various forms of antagonism, like they're like, well, the point of human history is for everyone to to follow me and to obey me and to worship me as a kind of thing. Whereas I think actually, in fact, the point

• 16:25Speaker 01

  is, how do we learn to go through life together? You know, life is a team sport, a friendship journey, etc., as ways of doing this. And I think that's what's important to learn and to to help push for in various ways. So, for example, if people realize it in sufficient scale,

• 16:49Speaker 01

  And express those demands in a market. Journalists reinforcing that or you know, kind of influencers reinforcing that and governments, you know, in over years and sometimes decades. Being representative of the people and viewing that representative of the people being call it 80% plus people, not 51% of the most motivated voters as a, as a, as a, as a kind of spread of this, then I think that it does naturally over iteration tend to, tend to

• 17:29Speaker 01

  get there. Now, again, being said, how fast does it get there? How much, what, how painful it transitions? Does it even get there eventually? That cannot be done. When you think about this, you can't just be passive. You have to be active in helping steer it.

• 17:46Speaker 00

  So thinking about how we're sort of steering in the right direction, everyone wants to know what is going to happen in the world of economics. What is going to happen to jobs? What is going to be sort of the software company of the future, the trillion dollar company of the future? And there's sort of an emerging or reemerging thesis that actually the next trillion dollar company won't actually sell software. It'll sell work. And the argument goes something like this. If you sell a co-pilot, you know, a tool that helps a human do their job, you're just competing with every new model release that comes out every few weeks or months. But if you sell the outcome itself, like you say, we're going to get you this revenue, we're going to sell you contracts reviewed, we're going to send you, sell you

• 18:30Speaker 00

  claims processed, you're actually doing something from the company and you're essentially in a completely different business. You're actually better productizing a services business, which used to be sort of less lucrative, but perhaps in the future with the ability to productize it, it actually becomes much more lucrative. So you're competing with the human labor that used to do the job. AI can do it faster, cheaper, cheaper and at scale. Like we're already seeing some of this play out, or at least we're seeing people guess and predict that this is coming in the next few years. And so do you buy this framing that sort of the winning AI companies won't really sell software, but they'll sell the work itself?

• 19:09Speaker 01

  So yes, with some asterixes. You ultimately need to be.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  In the engagement of how are you selling the outcomes to customers? And a little bit of the framing of the question of sell software, sell outcomes, is it's always been in service of the outcomes. And so is the notion of like, I sell you a spreadsheet tool like Microsoft Excel, or I sell you a financial analysis that also engages us? The answer is, of course, with an agentic model, it's moved much more further down the I'm selling you a financial analysis. But part of this thing this tends to over overclaim is to say, well, it'll just be AIs, right?

• 19:58Speaker 01

  And and by the way, in some possibilities, customer service, et cetera, yes, it will. There will be actually various other places where the the kind of the engagement of the human in this will really matter. Whether it's because somebody wants to be talking to a human for, do I trust your reliability in providing the service? And you have a engagement for that. And sure, the person's working with a bunch of agents, but they're, but I need to have a person that I can be talking with to to have that sense of trust. Maybe yes, maybe no, you know, as an instance, but there's a bunch of different possibilities. And so I don't think it, I think that's part of the reason why in like super agency,

• 20:41Speaker 01

  you know, a lot of focus on amplification. Doesn't mean that there isn't some areas of real replacement, doesn't mean that there aren't some areas of real, you know, just switching to the AI providing the entire service. Now here's where it gets the next asterix, which is they say, wow, so, you know, you're you're paying a lawyer a thousand dollars an hour. So you'll be paying the AI agent $900 an hour. That's not necessarily the case when it kind of when it shifts. And part of what reshifts the human labor is because, well, maybe actually, in fact, in computer hours, you're going to be paying the AI $20 an hour for this. And the $20 an hour thing will flood it. There will be a bunch of jobs.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  A bunch of work tasks, some jobs that that were like the, oh, I used to be charging a hundred dollars an hour for that. Now it's like being done much more effectively and quickly for twenty dollars an hour and it's being done this way. This is also, of course, part of the reason why we saw a lot of globalization of jobs and customer service jobs and sales jobs and other things. But like those will, they will change the economics of where the whole thing works. And so one of the things I find entertaining about tech investors doing this, like, ha ha, my business model is, I will be charging the same for the service, but now I will be providing a much cheaper software. It's like, no, no, the economics of the whole thing are going to change.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  And by the way, where human beings fit in the mix, like which salaries go up, which salaries go down, how many jobs there are, that's very transformational. And there's two things to say to that transformational side, too. One, people frequently don't realize the Jevon's paradox part of this, which is like, for example, a bunch of smart people have been saying, software engineers, there'll be out of, there'll be no software engineering jobs in in in two years. And I will take the counter bet to that because I actually think there'll be more because I think there will be, there's infinite demand at a certain price for software engineering jobs. And so you get the the the AI amplification through, you know, kind of Claude code and codex and others, you know, for the doing this.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  But you get this, you get this implication, that implication says, well, but okay, well, then what happens? They say, and this gets to the second point, they say, well, when you used to have a hundred software engineers, you're not going to have thirty because it's much more effective in terms of doing it's like, so then those seventy we had work. It's actually what I think is those seventy will now be working other places. I think there'll be more entrepreneurial places. I think places that have traditionally not been able to hire software engineers that will now hire software engineers. And that's a little bit of like when people say, well, but company X in doing it, it's gotten to the natural mature sides of its market. It can't grow its market. So what it'll do to make itself stronger is it'll have fewer employees. It's like, well, but then other people will engage and hire those employees in other kinds of businesses.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  And this gets to why entrepreneurship is so important. This part is part of the reason I wrote my first book, The Startup of You, and why blitzscaling is that, you know, we as societies, we as, you know, cities and regions, we as countries, we as industries.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  We need entrepreneurship intensely because you need to be able to create the new products and services, the new jobs, the new companies. Because you go, okay, great. We no longer have 100 companies in this space. We now have 200 with employees now more divided across them in terms of doing things. And that may be more specialization, classic Adam Smith. You know, this one is accounting for, you know, small businesses that are restaurants. This one's accounting for small businesses that are dry cleaners. This one's accounting for, you know, da, da, da, da. I'm deliberately being like toy problem-ish in this. But like, that's the kind of thing I think will get to the jobs,

• 24:34Speaker 01

  a lot of transformation. And then all the way back to it, I think AI will be the common thread between selling the software and selling the jobs is the most implication of the business's ability to provide products and services that the market really wants at effective prices, which is part of the virtue and value of capitalism. And so that, I think, is where it will continue to be. And this is a decisive progression along this. And the subtle point to the not selling software, selling work is the business models

• 25:14Speaker 01

  of how software is engaged in terms of dollars, the framing of it, the way it works, will probably evolve a lot.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I mean, already, when you think about AI versus software, if I buy a license for Excel, I can use it as much as I want. If I buy Canva, I can use it as much as I want. If I have Figma license and AI already, you can't use it as much as you want. You're paying by the hour. You're paying for some of the output. So it'll be interesting to see how that change, especially with compute costs, you know, hopefully, predictively falling through the floor. So Reid, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Always fun. Possible is produced by Palette Media. It's hosted by Ari Fingert and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Tenasi Delos, Katie Sanders, Spencer Strasmore, Imo Zoo, Trent Barboza, and Tafadwa Nirmarundwe.

• 26:05Speaker 00

  Special thanks to Surya Yalimanchili, Sayida Sabieva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Ralas.