No Priors Ep. 45 | With Reid Hoffman

(music plays) Hi listeners, and welcome to another episode of No Priors. This week we're joined by my longtime friend and partner Reid Hoffman. He needs no introduction as co-founder of PayPal, LinkedIn, and now Inflection AI, as well as Microsoft board member and former OpenAI founding board member. He's a prolific author, podcaster, and political activist, and he's also one of my favorite technology optimists, big picture thinkers, and supporter of people and founders. Welcome Reid. Thanks for doing this.

Great to be here and love what you guys are doing and, you know, uh, longtime, uh, friends and partners with both of you. So this is awesome.

We will start with a small question, which is what is your view on the state of AI today? What do we need more of and less of?

Well, um, I mean the obvious thing about AI that everyone probably listening to this podcast already agrees with is that it's somewhere between the largest, you know, tech transformation of our lifetime and perhaps the largest tech transformation of, of, of human history. And one of the things I use to describe it is like steam engine of the mind. So just like the steam engine gave us physical powers, you know, kind of superpowers of, you know, construction and transport and manufacturing and a bunch of other things, this will give us a whole bunch of mental superpowers. It's both the implication of humanity, um, which is part of what the Impromptu book was gesturing towards. And also there will be some places where we will create, you know, kind of, um, uh, substitution, uh, replacement of work in various ways. And obviously we'll get into some depth on that. But I think that's the, the macro picture. And then with that of course there's tons of things that are current status and current needs, and you know, I think everyone tends to be a little bit over-predict like how quickly things like everything will change next year, and that's not gonna happen. Um, but then they tend to under-predict, you know, 10, 20 years, um, in some ways in terms of how the transitions. Although, you know, obviously because just like all technologies, the doomsayers come out first. Um, whether it's the printing press, electricity, everything else is like, "This is the end of the world." You can go back and you can find that this is the end of the world in each of these things. You know, the printing press was described as, as degrading human capabilities through cognition and spreading misinformation, um, as, as an example. And, um, but you know what I'd say that probably as an arc the thing that I would want to see more of in the... And that's part of the reason why I did Impromptu the way I did, in the creation, theorization, and the design of what we're doing in artificial intelligence is more in the kind of symbiotic, uh, amplification loop. We tend to as technologists say, "Well, I'm going to have autonomous vehicles and they're going to drive separately," which I think is a good thing in that case, uh, because I think, you know, you don't need an amplification loop. You just need, uh, effective logistics, you know, safety, uh, you know, save the 40,000 deaths that we currently have in, in human-driv- driven vehicles and so forth. You can go in depth in that if that's useful. But like, like the fact is there's gonna be a whole bunch of things that are actually going to be better with people plus, um, AI. That "plus" is a thing to focus on. And I think we haven't nearly as much, and that's of course part of the reason I wrote Impromptu.