Pioneers of AI: Reid Hoffman says the AI race is not a cage match

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**Reid Hoffman** (1:45)
When you think about OpenAI and Anthropic, well, if you believe that AI has the impact of applying intelligence with the scale and price of electricity across everything, these are going to be two of the major providers of that. We tend to want to tell these stories as cage matches. You know, well, one of them is going to win, and the other one's not. You're like, well, actually, in fact, there's a lot of room for both of them to win incredibly.

**Rana El-Kalyoubi** (2:10)
Almost every dinner conversation I'm at, like the big question is, can you make sense of the valuation of these companies? So what should my answer be?

**Reid Hoffman** (2:18)
Think of it as a little bit like internet valuations. Some of them will have turned out to be insane and go to zero, and some of them will have turned out to be way too low and have gone up a lot higher.
And then the trick is, which ones?

**Rana El-Kalyoubi** (2:35)
Reid Hoffman is one of the leading tech investors of our time, and I'm lucky to call him a mentor and a friend. He's co-founder of LinkedIn and has backed so many influential startups. Plus, he served on the board of Microsoft for a decade. He's recently said he's turning his focus to Manas AI, his AI drug discovery company. With Anthropic and OpenAI on the path to going public, and SpaceX surpassing a $2 trillion valuation after its IPO, I needed a check-in with Reid.
So we hopped on to talk about what's signal and what's noise in the AI race and so much more. I'm Rana El-Kalyoubi, and this is Pioneers of AI, a podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution.
Hi, Reid. Welcome again to Pioneers of AI.

**Reid Hoffman** (3:32)
My absolute pleasure.

**Rana El-Kalyoubi** (3:34)
It is always so great to have you on the show. It's been a while since we last chatted, and as with everything in the AI world, lots of updates, so I'm excited to catch up.

**Reid Hoffman** (3:44)
Likewise.

**Rana El-Kalyoubi** (3:45)
So I want to start with some personal updates on your end. So after a decade of serving on the Microsoft board, you departed from the board.

**Reid Hoffman** (3:54)
Actually, I just said I wouldn't stand for re-election, which means I'm on it through the end of the year.

**Rana El-Kalyoubi** (4:00)
But you largely did that because you are going back to founder mode and focusing on Manas. So tell us more about that. I'm actually really intrigued by that.

**Reid Hoffman** (4:09)
Well, when Ujwal, Sid and I had been doing the work in the last couple of months, and we're beginning to see some small molecule proposals from our AI drug discovery engine that our computational chemists are looking at and going, oh my God, that's really interesting. And that could work. And I said, okay, I've really got to make sure that this thing is navigating and building these things really matters.
And so I got to focus on this and kind of talk to Satya. I said, look, it's been a long time. I'm always a friend and an ally. We'll continue to help even afterwards. But I'd really like to spend my time more on building, on being a founder than essentially kind of being a governance person.