Reid riffs on AI milestones and AI efforts abroad

Reid recounts the story of a milestone GPT-4 demo at Bill Gates’ house—and shares what series of achievements by AI would most impress and excite him next. Aria also asks Reid about the investment in technology and AI that he’d like to see be made at the domestic and international level. Lastly, Reid addresses the skepticism people have about AI—and how to best direct that skepticism to the benefit of people. 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.

• 0:02Aria Finger?

  And I'm Aria Finger.

• 0:03Reid Hoffman?

  Too often, when we talk about the future, it's all doom and gloom.

• 0:08Aria Finger?

  Instead, we want to sketch out the brightest version of the future and what it will take to get there. We're talking about how technology and humanity can come together to create a better future.

• 0:21Reid Hoffman?

  This is possible.

• 0:24Aria Finger?

  We love the community that we're building with this show, and we hear you. You've asked for more of Reid's takes. So, starting this season, every other week, Reid will be in the hot seat. I get to ask him a few questions in the spirit of the previous week's episodes and get his thoughts on the latest on AI, technology, and the future.

• 0:49Aria Finger?

  Reid, I am so excited for our new segment where we get to turn the tables and I get to ask you some questions related to the topic of the day. So, last week, we spoke with Kevin Scott, such a brilliant technologist, humanist, and we got to talk to him about both the sort of geography of jobs and AI and how do we make sure that tech is spread out equitably, but also sort of the origins of AI and how people are adopting this at different speeds. You know, you and I have been talking to experts in AI and we're so excited about what's to come, but a lot of people are just learning about it and there's a lot of skepticism. So, I want to ask you a question about another technologist

• 1:32Aria Finger?

  who you are, obviously, work closely with, Bill Gates. And he was very excited about AI, but potentially skeptical about this approach. You know, would this approach be able to give you the gains, intelligence that we were looking for? And one of the things he said was, "Once we have a tool that could pass an AP bio exam, you know, that's interesting. That's a level of intelligence that I'm excited about." And so, I think you, Sam Altman and Kevin Scott, did just that. You went by his house and showed him this latest technology that could pass an AP bio exam. So, tell us about what was that like?

• 2:06Reid Hoffman?

  So, Bill, obviously, has been a great advocate of the importance of AI for years in advance of this current revolution. And Part of it that he, you know, super smart guy was saying, look, one of the things that's really important is to be able to have a knowledge representation of the world and so forth. And so he was initially kind of throwing out some interesting challenges to the large scale language model approach. But, you know, one of the things that's great about Bill, he learns and updates intensely. And so part of the dialogue was say, look, if you could show that it could read a set of biology textbooks and pass an AP Bio exam, then that would show that it would have sufficient knowledge representation, even

• 2:48Reid Hoffman?

  if you can't point to the symbols in the computer that do it, that would reflect that. And we're like, oh, well, we think we can do that. So we went off and as part of training GBD4, we did not train it specifically on AP Bio exam. We just trained it on a wide range of all textbooks and a bunch of other things. And so we arranged a dinner at Bill's house in Seattle, had, you know, a stack of OpenAI people. The person presenting was Greg Brockman, a set of folks around the Microsoft, you know, Satya was obviously there, but some other executives like, you know, Rajesh and Charlie Bell and others,

• 3:31Reid Hoffman?

  and, you know, Kevin, obviously. And so we went through it. And we actually even had this woman who was one of the biology exam Olympians there to help, you know, kind of ask the questions and parse it and kind of evaluate what we're doing. And we started going into the showing the demo. And when I asked Bill at the end of that, I said, so where does this rank in tech demos that you've seen? Bill said to me, he said, well, there's only been one other that might be as good as this one. And that was when I was demonstrated the graphical user interface at, you know, at Xerox PARC, right? And so

• 4:11Reid Hoffman?

  it's at least that, if not even better. It was an epic room that I think we all felt privileged to be in the room for.

• 4:20Aria Finger?

  And do you have a similar sort of test now? Like, what is your AP Bio exam? Is there something that you're like, man, if AI could do XYZ, you know, today or by the end of the year that you would be similarly excited for? Like, we're passing by these milestones. We're like blowing past them. Is there something you're excited about?

• 4:41Reid Hoffman?

  There's a whole stack and they range from some things that are kind of more pedestrian, which is thinking about things like inflection and pi, which is can it remember a sequence of actions and execute a plan of being your agent out in the world like, hey, you know, I'm going to Rome, you know, book me a good tour of the Vatican Museum and you know, that kind of stuff as a way of operating. And there's a whole stack of stuff in that. There's also memory and personalization of remembering you and what matters to you. And so that's all, I think all this stuff will happen, but there's a bunch of things that are, that will be important milestones as we get there in the development of it. Then there is a stack of things that we think, okay, you know, high probability of accomplish exactly when.

• 5:25Reid Hoffman?

  So for example, a lot of what people are working on right now is reasoning and general reasoning capabilities, because you know, part of what you see is you can break these things by getting them to, they don't understand when they're making foolish mistakes like around prime numbers or other kinds of things and an ability to kind of navigate that. And I think some more general reasoning capabilities, which will improve capabilities for the cognitive industrial revolution. And then you get to the next level up, which is things that you have a good possibility to do, but they are hard and will take specific work. Drug discovery, you know, and other kind of, you know, biological sciences and so forth, which, you know, there's, there is obviously good work going on.

• 6:10Reid Hoffman?

  Protein folding, you know, with isomorphic and bakerfold and other kinds of things. But there's also you're going to be some very specific work that will make some amazing discoveries. And then the next level beyond that is, well, could it start doing things that basically we currently don't see a line of sight for doing? But could do amazing things like, for example, could it help us with the invention and creation of fusion power? Or could it discover, you know, new branches of mathematics or make some intersections between different scientific fields because there's so much density of information, it goes well

• 6:50Reid Hoffman?

  outside any even, you know, one genius's head, but to multiple people's head and then pulling that together. And that's unclear. The probability of that, obviously you go, well, but we're still increasing cognitive capabilities, only matter of time. It's like, well, not clear because you could increase cognitive capabilities infinitely for the next hundred years and still not get that. Right? It's how you're increasing the cognitive capabilities. And that's one of the reasons why people frequently, both the proponents and the critics can be a little hyperbolic and histrionic in either direction because they just go, it's increasing IQ. You know, it's like, well, no, it's it's increasing set of cognitive capabilities, some

• 7:33Reid Hoffman?

  of which already today are superhuman and amazing, and we will continue those. But like, you know, what set of it really depends on how like, will it be creating new science or not, new physics or not, or other?

• 7:48Aria Finger?

  Well, one of the things we talked a lot about with Kevin last week was geography. You know, he grew up in a rural area and obviously made, you know, made his way to Silicon Valley. And I have to admit, before I started working together with you, I don't think I really understood the magic of Silicon Valley. And I will, I will admit that there is so much magic there in, in the network and in the helping each other and sort of the deep concentration of talent. But I also know that you, you know, care deeply about equity and making sure that these new technologies are sort of spread out evenly to everyone. So are there certain like geographies, you know, city, state, county, international,

• 8:29Aria Finger?

  where you would like to see more investment made when it comes to technology and AI? Like, how can we spread this out? Is it geographic investment that's needed or something else?

• 8:39Reid Hoffman?

  Well, there's a stack of things. I mean, you know, people, obviously in the industry like to talk about network effects and regions have network effects. And by the way, regions have network effects like Hollywood or New York for media. You know, and there's these network effects because it brings in talent. It brings in all of the necessary resources for creating, you know, the next level, the next evolution of projects in this. And Silicon Valley is obviously one of the, you know, great lights in the entire world for what happens here technologically, but we're better off the more locations and the more places we have for doing this. And the way to do it is a little challenging because you do get, you know, these intense network effects.

• 9:18Reid Hoffman?

  Like if people say, I want to, you know, move somewhere to maximally create an AI startup in the world. Silicon Valley is a good choice today for that. But by the way, London is not a bad choice. Paris is not a bad choice. Right? And so there's a stack of things and what you're trying to do is build it up. So some of that's investment in the area. Some of that's government policy. Some of that's like one of the things that Macron has done very smartly in Paris that I think has helped with their AI thing is saying, hey, if you bring your technology experience back, Silicon Valley, other places and come here, you'll have a tax advantage status for coming back and working here to try to bring talent back in things.

• 10:00Reid Hoffman?

  And obviously when talent's there and can build amazing companies, global capital follows. And obviously also you need high expertise and, you know, there's a bunch of great technical schools in France, you know, and obviously also in London, Oxford and Cambridge and, you know, other places for this and all of those things play in. Now, the one kind of thing that I tend to always emphasize, and that's part of the reason I talked about Macron's genius gesture here, is you always want to be building off the network. But how do you bring, how do you extend the network? So it's like, how do you make connections between Silicon Valley and Paris? How do you bring the talent that has learned a bunch of stuff in Silicon Valley and have

• 10:45Reid Hoffman?

  company formulation in Paris? And so, yes, you want capital, yes, you want investment, yes, you want government policy, yes, you want immigration stuff, yes, you want startup friendly to be able to take bold steps and move things and to. Make an effort and innovation without having to, you know, cross prove your possible innovation benefit, you know, 15 different ways before you do anything, you know, et cetera, et cetera. All of that's important, but you need to be building on the network and leverage as much of a network as you can. And, you know, I think probably the, the first time I had that observation and started doing that was when I joined and helped a set of efforts in the UK. First Silicon Valley comes to Oxford and then Silicon Valley comes to the UK with Sherry Kutu.

• 11:30Reid Hoffman?

  In order to be bringing that network building, which brings a proxy of the strengths we have in Silicon Valley to help elevate other geographies as well.

• 11:40Aria Finger?

  Yeah, no, I mean, I love it. So, speaking of AI, you're always going to get people being skeptical. Uh, they were skeptical in the early days, people are skeptical now. Um, you are not a skeptical. Uh, what do you think is the most misplaced skepticism of, of AI and why?

• 12:00Reid Hoffman?

  Well, as you know, I beat the optimistic drum very loudly because, uh, every, the vast majority of people think that they're being helpful and clever by articulating their skepticism. And actually, in fact, I think most people's articulation of skepticism is actually harmful for humanity and so forth. And not because they should, they should be quiet, but it's like do the work to articulate your skepticism in a way that helps you build something that's good. The whole point is we're trying to get to a really amazing thing. I'm trying to navigate our way there. And so the question is to say, well, what are the most important things that might go wrong? And what are the possibilities of how to navigate around those? So the question is, is talk to people who are trying to talk about what to do with this

• 12:45Reid Hoffman?

  and help shift to here are specific kinds of things that you need to be doing. So the kinds of things that I advocate are, we have many, many years of this being a human amplifying technology. So the question is, how do we amplify essentially the right humans, like say doctors, educators, entrepreneurs creating products and services, et cetera, et cetera, to do great things for human beings and less for human beings who are being destructive? Criminals, cybercriminals, terrorists, rogue states. And obviously, the engineer tends to be like, let's try to create the tools so it can't be used for bad. And obviously, guardrails and safety on the tools is good, but ultimately, human beings,

• 13:27Reid Hoffman?

  it's like, we don't say, hey, we'll just, we'll make the nuclear bomb self-determining about when it's going to go off or not. We actually put it in selective hands. And that's an extreme example, but it's kind of like the, okay, what are the things we do to make sure that the set of hands is in none of the critically bad and then as many of the good as possible? Another one is you go, well, we're working very fast in building this technology. Are there any areas where we could possibly be kind of putting a runaway train out there? But you have to look at what the areas of those possibility are. And so, for example, when people say, well, I would like to set up AI without human beings

• 14:08Reid Hoffman?

  in the loop in the following thing, you go, well, go look at Doctor Strangelove or War Games. Let's have relatively little, right? Like autonomous major systems completely controlled by AI until we understand what the systems go at a very high level of probability. That, I think, is a general goodness and a kind of a principle. And so, like, what are those areas that you should be cautious about? And it's one of the reasons why, like, for example, one of the things I've been doing over the last, you know, at least eight years, has been arranging kind of 501(c)(3)'s of

• 14:47Reid Hoffman?

  universities and Vatican working group and governments and everyone else to pull together key leading developers, including a lot of commercial labs, to say, look, let's share information on how to make this aligned well with very positive human outcomes and how to avoid potential destructive elements, whether it's humans using it or accidents or other things, by sharing that kind of information. But like, safety protocols and awareness of how each other are thinking about it. So they can challenge each other and say, hey, are you doing well enough here on what your even potentially social impact might be by releasing this technology?

• 15:32Reid Hoffman?

  Have you have you done some red teaming? Have you done some testing, et cetera? And, you know, not surprising for you and other people who know me, it's a classic network thing to increase probabilities of very good things and decrease probabilities of bad things.

• 15:48Aria Finger?

  I love it. I mean, to your point about total network building, like it sometimes feels like these camps are separate camps and never the two shall meet and they don't talk, they don't speak the same language, you know, they both think they're doing the right thing. So sometimes just getting them in the same room is so critical. Reid, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

• 16:09Reid Hoffman?

  Aria, always fun. 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 Schleid, Adrian Bain, and Paloma Moreno Jimenez. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.

• 16:31Aria Finger?

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