LinkedIn Co-Founder Opens Up on AI Job Loss w/ Reid Hoffman, Dave, Salim, and AWG | EP #194

Peter Diamandis (0:00)

Entry-level job loss. You made some pretty, I think, sharp comments on this conversation. How do you think about this?

Reid Hoffman (0:06)

Job transformations, they are coming. Tech entrepreneur and co-founder of LinkedIn. Co-founder of Inflection AI, a partner at Greylock.

SPEAKER_3 (0:15)

His new book is Super Agency. What could possibly go right with our AI future?

Salim Ismail (0:20)

Please welcome Reid Hoffman.

Reid Hoffman (0:21)

It is definitely the case that AI will lead to a lot of job transformation, in some cases flat out job loss, but also I think we will adapt perfectly fine.

Peter Diamandis (0:32)

The career of the future is entrepreneurship. It is how do you use these tools to create value in the world?

Salim Ismail (0:37)

The entry-level job of two years from now will be very different than the entry-level job today.

Dave Blundin (0:42)

I think if you look at the industrial revolution, the net effect is always more job creation in the long run. The problem is the timeline is so short. It's happening much faster than just the raw job displacement you would expect.

Reid Hoffman (0:53)

We all need to think much more entrepreneurially, and here are some of the lessons of entrepreneurship, and here's how to think about them.

Dave Blundin (1:02)

Now, that's the Moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

Peter Diamandis (1:07)

Everybody, welcome to another episode of WTF Just Happened in Tech. This is the news that's important for you to learn if you want to change and transform your life, your company, your industry. This is the news that's about hopefully an optimistic vision of the future, not about sort of dystopian views. It's about hopefully real views. It's things that you can use. I'm here today with my Moonshot mates, Dave Blundin, Alex Wissner-Gross and Salim Ismail. And the special guest, a friend now for, I don't know, probably at least 20 plus years, Reid Hoffman. You know, Reid as the creator of LinkedIn. Many companies on the board of Microsoft outspoken about this tech field. And I'm excited to get Reid's input on a lot of the topics we're going to be discussing today. So without any further ado, first off, Salim.

Just back from India, I missed you in the last two versions of this podcast. And the question is, did you solve the trade issues? And did you bring me back my iPhone 17?

Salim Ismail (2:06)

I did not bring it back. I brought back some parts. So if you want to assemble it yourself, you can. Because, you know, that's somewhat flaky over there sometimes. The two things that blew my mind was the attitude of everybody in India was literally middle finger to the USA. And I think this is a big challenge because if India and the US or India and China start trading, the rest of the world kind of goes to hell. And so it's kind of a big deal. But what I found most incredible was the unbelievable optimism for AI and the use cases that are exploding there out of the gate. And I think that's amazingly exciting.

Peter Diamandis (2:44)

And we'll get to that a little bit. Dave, I just saw you up at Stanford. We interviewed the CEO of Replet along with Salim. That was a fun conversation.

Dave Blundin (2:54)

Yeah, yeah, it was fantastic. I'm still here actually.

Salim Ismail (2:57)

150 million repositories, incredible.

Dave Blundin (3:02)

Yeah, no, the code's piling up like crazy. Well, that'll come out soon, but Peter used it on his plane too. So it shows you.

Peter Diamandis (3:08)

Yeah, it was great. It was so fun. I literally downloaded Replet. I had Starlink on the dash of my SR-22 and I was flying connected and I coded a, what was it, a mindset app on the way up there. It was great. Yeah. Tweeted it out. All right.

Let's drop in on the subject of jobs and education. Reid, I want to go to you first. Our common friend, Eric Benhoffsen, published a paper recently with these charts looking at entry level job loss, down 16 percent in AI exposed fields. You made some pretty, I think, sharp comments on this conversation. How do you think about this?

Reid Hoffman (3:52)

Well, a couple of things. It is definitely the case that AI will lead to a lot of job transformation. In some cases, flat out job loss, a simple heuristic that I sometimes use, it's a partial heuristic, is if the human being is trying to do a job by following a script that an AI can follow better, customer service, etc., that will happen. But obviously, some of the issues here are around questions of not just customer service, but also like software engineering. Now, that being said, even with a kind of a downbeat in possible initial software engineering job hires, my belief is that that is only a transformation issue, partially because I actually think if anything, the thinking about how you do software and software engineering is actually going to get a lot more widespread in problem-solving, because part of what AI is going to lead to is a software co-pilot for all of us, that anything that you're doing that involves thinking, anything that you're involved doing, communication language will also involve, as it were, custom software that you'll be doing. I think that there's still nearly infinite hiring demand for software engineers. So it's a little bit of a complicated thing. Eric is awesome and this work is awesome, and so it's job transformations, they are coming.