The case for AI optimism

**Sarah** (0:07)
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 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.

**Reid Hoffman** (0:31)
Great to be here and love what you guys are doing, and long time friends and partners with both of you. So this is awesome.

**Sarah** (0:38)
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?

**Reid Hoffman** (0:45)
Well, 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 tech transformation of our lifetime and perhaps the largest tech transformation of human history. 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 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, 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 substitution, a replacement of work in various ways. And obviously, we'll get into some depth on that. But I think that's 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 a little bit overpredict, like how quickly things, like everything will change next year, and that's not going to happen.
But then they tend to underpredict, you know, 10, 20 years in some ways in terms of how the transition is. Although, you know, obviously, because just like all technologies, the doomsayers come out first, 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 degrading human capabilities through cognition and spreading misinformation.
As an example.
But you know what I'd say, that probably as an arc, the thing that I would want to see more of, 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 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, because I think you don't need an amplification loop, you just need effective logistics, safety, save the 40,000 deaths that we currently have in human-driven vehicles and so forth. You can go in depth on that if that's useful. But the fact is, there's going to be a whole bunch of things that are actually going to be better with people plus 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.

**Sarah** (3:27)
Do you have a favorite example of where you already see the amplification loop you're talking about, or AI and humans working collaboratively together?

**Reid Hoffman** (3:35)
So a friend of mine's kid first started with exposure to GPD 4 and was like, I'm going to do sonnets, whatever, whatever, I don't care.

**Sarah** (3:46)
Wait, how old is this kid for context?

**Reid Hoffman** (3:47)
Fifteen.
Right, kid, you know, really interested in organic chemistry and realized that she could place scientific papers in GPD 4 and say, explain this to me, I'm a 15-year-old. Right, and already, like, the entire world opened up to her, and I learned something from that, because I was like, oh, yeah, there's occasionally these really complicated papers that I'm looking at going, I don't have the two hours to try to decode. Hey, I could do what she's doing. That's smart. Right, and so that exists today. Part of the thing that I try to tell the various concerned pessimists that say, well, you know, here's my job, you know, to limit what the large tech companies are doing with artificial intelligence. Well, actually, in fact, we have a line of sight to a medical assistant on every smartphone. That's five billion smartphones in the world.