Reid Hoffman.
Good afternoon. Big breaking news, Bob Iger.
Do you know who that is? Absolutely.
Bob and I have been friends for decades. Okay, so Bob Iger has extended his stay.
It's funny way of putting it as CEO of Disney through 2026.
What do you make of that? So Bob is, I think, one of the great
CEOs of our time. I think he cares a lot about Disney.
And he's been a great steward. I think he's
done. The news doesn't surprise me.
I didn't have any I learned about it here.
I didn't I didn't actually know in advance.
But I think it's part of what you want CEOs to be doing, which is acting like
owners and feeling that the the important thing is the legacy of the
company that they hand on to their successors, to employees, to society.
And I think Bob is that guy. Excellent.
Shall we talk about artificial intelligence?
Certainly. You know, let's start on this single
idea. I or the development of as a
meritocracy. I know that we've discussed that the
principle before, but like, why is I a meritocracy?
So there's a lot of different ways of looking at meritocracy.
And I actually like the world, even though the word has gotten under some
disfavor over time. I think of AI is amplification
intelligence, not artificial intelligence as as an amplifier of human
abilities. So I wrote this book, the first book on
AI, co-written with AI earlier this year, impromptu.
And part of it was to say, the way we look at this is not as a AI versus
people AI versus humankind, but AI with humankind.
And as such, you say, well, now, for example, I'm not I'm not a very good
poet. I can write sonnets.
I could write you a sonnet for your birthday.
That's that's something I could do. I think what we're going to have is
every human being's going to have a personal intelligence system that will
help them in anything from work tasks, but also like, Oh, I have this difficult
conversation with a friend. I'm trying to figure it out.
Talk to me about it. And so someone to talk to about it with
it. And I think that's the meritocracy of
enabling humanity to essentially anyone who has access to a smart device, a
smartphone, something else. That's the broad principle.
Yes. Then there's your personal relationship
with AI. There is Reid Hoffman, the investor,
Reid Hoffman, the co-founder, and Reid Hoffman, the academic, for want of a
better expression. Which one is winning at the moment, huh?
Well, I hope they win together. I mean, this is one thing, though.
Which one are you most focused on being at the moment?
Well, to these days, it's always humanity first.
Right. So.
But by the way, sometimes people kind of think, oh, if you're doing an investment
that's a for profit company, it can't be for humanity.
I think obviously can be. My own company, LinkedIn, was, I think,
an example of that. Airbnb is an example that I think
there's a lot of places where these tech companies amplify humanity in really
good ways. The same thing with inflection.
So I think the same way with these A.I. companies, which is I wouldn't be doing
it if I didn't think it would make individual people and societies better.
I had Mustafa Suleiman on Bloomberg Technology with me the other day, your
co-founder and partner to Mitt to a certain extent.
He described having one hundreds in video views in a way that made it seem
like a badge of honor. Why is having a cluster of H1 hundreds
from our global audience that is India's most powerful AI focused GPU graphics
processing unit. It's a badge of honor.
So what it really is, is a badge of a declaration, of possibility and
potential. Because with this huge cluster H 100,
you can train amazing eyes that that pie inflections, personal intelligence
system isn't just going to be high IQ, but also high IQ.
Like, how can it how can it like when you say, Oh, my friends,
a treasured dog just died, what should I do?
Oh, that must be really hard for your friend and really hard for you.
How. What's, you know, your friend.
What's a good way of being there for your friend and being that not just
like. Oh, well, normally you would send a
note, and maybe in the note you would express your condolences.
It's like, No, that's not an easy way of expressing this.
And so what it is, is saying we have the computational capabilities to make
amazing agents, okay? One of which is already live.
You can go to API dot com and you can see it.
You have relationships with many members of the ecosystem, and I want to
understand how that works. You were on the board of Open Air.
You are no longer. You took a decision to step down.
Explain that first. So open I great organization.
One of the leading things that has made our work.
I literally spent 2 hours working with Sam Altman yesterday.
Still continue to help. Part of the challenge is I put on a blog
post is that I was getting more and more requests from all of my portfolio
companies to get privileged access to open air.
And part of when you're on a five and see three, I literally could say I
cannot help you at all. There's the front door open.
I can't talk to anybody about it because it would be a malfeasance on my 523
board of directors, you know, fiduciary responsibility.
Yes. Literally, the day after I stepped off
the board, I said that was him. Said, here's three companies that I
think would be really good for open air and for the for the company if you gave
them privileged access to the APIs and all the rest.
And so it's important not just to have integrity, but to show in all quarters
that you're acting with integrity. Okay.
So then we talk about inflection. I just a monster first round that they
raised. They coexist.
How does that work in your shoes? So for
Open Eye five. One, two, three.
Beneficial Agent for Humanity Inflexion Public Benefit Corporation.
Right. So it's trying to make value out of its
equity, trying to make a business and is not focused on AGI or artificial
intelligence, but like a personal intelligence for every human being.
Yes. So even though you get churchy beauty
when you said, well, okay, there's a chat bot, there's lots of chat bots.
Microsoft, which has a relationship with open AI and infection, has been chat.
As a chat bot, there's going to be dozens of chat bot that will fill
different roles and people's lives. And so you know what I think chat CBT
will be was kind of the equivalent of instant Wikipedia.
Well, I think pie will be is kind of your personal buddy.
What I think Bing chat will be was is an amplification of Bing.
And so I'm Tom Vinod Khosla, another well-known venture
capitalists who you may be familiar with, said to me a few weeks ago that
90% of all of these AI focused starts out
A.I. native startups will not survive.
Do you agree with his his. Stance on that.
Well, so that's almost to some degree like an average technology, you know,
life and death threat was the one out of ten succeed is kind of classic for tech
companies. So as an application of a principle from
the history might be but since we're in such a an AI transformational wave, the
way I describe this is when the the the steam engine of the mind, the the
cognitive industrial revolution. Yes.
My guess is it might be many more surviving just because it's such a huge
impact on every company, every individual, every professional.
And so I would hazard higher percentage. But, you know, who knows?
I look at Greylock Portfolio, that is what some companies you may consider a
native, some air adjacent perhaps. Do you worry or to what extent do you
worry that some of them are kind of doing the same thing as each other?
And how differentiated are those in your portfolio?
So you always have a worry that two companies will track in and competing on
the exact same thing. And then you have to navigate that if it
happens because technology's always looking for what's the right way to
create an amazing, you know, a product service, an amazing business, a
transformation of an industry. But on the other hand, more often than
not at the beginning stages, you think they're going to be competitive like
chat bot and chat bot chat path leading. But this chat bots going to be end up
being something that's really great for like students and this one's going to
end up being really great for, you know, large company workers and, and they're
going to have different functions and this one's going to be, you know,
everyone's personal assistant, you know. So I tend to think that they you we over
worry about them competing and when the surface area is 10% competing, 90%
different, that's different. I want you to think as Reid Hoffman, the
venture capitalists, if you'll allow me to go down that route.
LinkedIn was acquired every Silicon Valley founders dream is
the Mega or IPO. But I do wonder if.
With so many startups being founded, how much consolidation we might see and M&A.
Oh, well, you're certainly going to see a bunch of M&A because every company,
certainly every tech company and probably many other companies as well
are going to need to have an A.I. strategy.
Right. And the question is, what's your
strategy? How are you doing it?
Now, some of them may work with a company like Microsoft or or Openai or
Inflexion or other and make that work. Others may, you know, homegrown their
own. Others may buy.
You're going to see a lot of them. There's no question.
You know, over the next 2 to 3 years, there'll be a whole bunch of human
activity. There are many names in this space.
One of those names is Elon Musk. And I don't know if you saw, but he on X
dot, I published an information about what they're up to and who they are as a
team. What do you make of all of that?
So Elon is one of the great entrepreneurs of our times.
I think, you know, Openai owes its foundational existence to his work.
So I think it's you know, he was a massive contributor.
I think Sam was that was one of the drivers.
But Elon was there shaping it, helping it.
So I think it's great. I think that he cares deeply about
humanity, which I think is also great news.
You know, I kind of look a little bit askance at signing a six month pause
letter while you're trying to accelerate your own effort and things like that.
But I think he's he's I think he is a great entrepreneur to have amongst the
entrepreneurs doing these things. I tweeted that X A.I.
had published this list of people. What surprised me.
So many people responded straight away, saying, every single one of the people
in that list is a man. There are no women on that list.
And they were really concerned by that in the context of developing large
language models. What is your your thoughts on that?
So, I mean, these things are going to have this kind of transformative impact.
It's very important that they are kind of inclusive of of different voices and
considerations. And so every effort that I'm part of, we
make a real effort not just on gender, which is, of course, an important thing.
Yes. But also on race, on geographic regions.
All of that kind of diversity inclusion actually matters because these things
are going to have such an impact on humanity.
If you don't do that, you may do something bad.
The United States has a lot going on in the theater of I that the question
increasingly asked is what do we know about China's progress in the field of
AI? What is your assessment of where they
are technologically? Can you is there a way you know, there's
no way of fully knowing because one of the benefits and challenges we have of
being part of this great Western system is we have a free press and a lots of
reporting, all the rest. That's I think, one of the things that's
great about our society and that's more challenged within China so you don't
have as much visibility. Now, that being said, they have amazing
technologists, they have amazing technical companies.
They are very dedicated to building technology for the future.
And so I think they will have a number of great AI efforts.
Their efforts are obviously somewhat challenged by the fact that large
language models are difficult to control.
And so can you get out? Can you make sure a very scale, large
language model can both generate all of this interesting material and also not
say, well, here is ten funny jokes about Xi Jinping, or here's the argument about
why the Chinese Communist Party is actually not a democracy that you had to
vote for once. And the the the Chinese government
system doesn't want that in any of its Internet or digital things.
So that's one challenge. And the data that they're training the
models on, why is that an important point of differentiation that the not
just the volume of data, but what is in the data?
Well, data is a complicated story when it
comes down to it. So when you're doing these large
language models, what you really need is volume of data versus the the the
specific like, oh, do you have this really high quality data?
Now, high quality data can be useful, useful for medical applications, useful
for coding, etc.. And by the way, the Chinese general lack
of privacy controls on data could make some of their efforts much stronger.
The challenge, of course, when you do that with large language model
approaches is those large language model approaches don't necessarily go, Here's
how I can obey CCP regulations. Yes, right.
And that's going to be one of the challenges are going to have.
We could talk for the rest of the week about AI for sure, but we won't.
Threats. Yes.
So look, I think Facebook has done a Metta has done a great product launch.
It's a high quality product. I think it's because of turbulence
around social media. They have a natural launch for that.
I think, by the way, Instagram has done things like this before, like they
launched stories and their stories launch was very successful and was part
of it became part of the Instagram ecosystem.
So we'll see how it stays. But its launch was amazing.
Mark Zuckerberg himself has been really active and engaged on the in the early
days of the platform with its users. I just wondered if you could reflect on
what you see in Mark now versus when all those years ago when Facebook started?
Well, one of Mark's strengths, which is the
strength of great entrepreneurs, is he's an infinite learner.
So he's been learning since then, like, what's the way that you what are the
things that you pay attention to? How do you launch good products?
Like this is a enormously successful product launch from an established
companies. Established companies don't that often
have new successful product launches, and this is one of them.
And so that's, I think, a testimony to what he's learned over the years.
Have you had a chance to discuss threads with him?
I have not. I hope to.
What is it that you think Threads has an advantage over other similar social
media platforms and what is its disadvantage?
So I think its advantage is it can do a it can do it can try to do a new launch
without some of the baggage that that other social media like we all learn as
we go. Like there's things like I would have
launched LinkedIn with all Influencers Network if I'd had the idea at the
beginning. Right.
It's a it's a vital part of keeping this kind of it's about business and vision
and leadership on LinkedIn. Undoubtedly, they have similar kind of
whatever their plans are for threads. I think it's applying those from a from
a from a from a launch. Like part of it is immediately
benefiting from your Instagram account is you knew that when you launched it,
you didn't have a cold start problem. That was one of the things that that is
a classic network building that they've navigated around, I think fairly
elegantly. But, you know, I,
I would anticipate that they have a whole bunch of plans that we have yet to
see. And on the disadvantage that it may have
over, I guess, for itself against other platforms.
So disadvantage. Well, typically it's when you try to
start from fresh you're starting cold start network problem.
They solved that one. Look, I personally hope that they are
doing more on the try to keep it to a more positive communications culture
versus which I think Instagram is generally more than you know, kind of
Facebook itself. So I hope for that but that.
Would be. That's a question.
Final thing is, can threads and Twitter both exist together?
For sure they can, but they may end up competing too.
But that still means they could exist together.
Reid Hoffman It's so nice to be here in person chatting with technology.
Yes. Thank you for your time.
A pleasure.
