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Aria Finger (0:00)

Reid, thank you so much for being here in New York to film this Reid Rifts. Great to be in person, always when we're chatting. So let's dive right in. The Financial Times recently reported that big tech is using guarantees to keep roughly $300 billion of AI exposure off its balance sheet. And the basic arrangement is that separate companies take out loans to build data centers or buy chips and have separate agreements with tech companies to cover losses if things go wrong. And so this helps finance the build out, but it means that people from the outside can't really see the full risk that's happening. And when you look at Alphabet, they alone doubled their exposure under these credit backstops in six months from about $17 billion to $44 billion, while recording a liability of just $815 million.

And so this might be a smart way to finance data centers, which you and I probably agree that we need to finance the AI revolution.

Or this could be companies that are taking on much more risk than they should, and obscuring it from the government, the American people, et cetera. What do you think about this way that we're financing?

Reid Hoffman (1:05)

Well, so I think there's two different issues here. So one issue is taking the risk, which I think they should do. I think it's worth it. I think intelligence at the scale and cost, electricity applied to a whole wide variety of things is a good thing. And yes, there might be, it is not guaranteeing that every dollar will be efficiently spent or effectively spent, because when does the revenue exactly come in? And at these numbers, you get worried that if it's, call it four years versus two years and that kind of thing. And there's some legitimate kind of financial effects. Now, there's the other thing, which is the lack of transparency, which is almost always a bad thing. Because it's kind of like, if you're hiding something, why are you hiding it? And so people should be like, in a sense, like my recommendation would have been if you said, we need to do this kind of legal structure because we want to still be reporting our books because there's weird things about how expenses and other kinds of things come on the books. And people say, oh, you should be doing stock charges as expenses and there's all this stuff.

You say, look, we want to report our books legitimately, legally, this way, and so we're going to do that. And so we'll do these deals, but we're going to tell people that we're doing these deals so that they're aware of them. I mean, it's just kind of always in the case of when you're hiding something and you're obscuring something, like that's mostly a very bad thing. Why are you doing that?

Aria Finger (2:29)

And so, I mean, we talked about this last week. AI has sort of broken containment from a news perspective. Now, everyone's talking about it. Everyday people were talking about different things, and it's even reached the government and the president.

I will just start with that. And so very important question, Reid, I will not be doing any impersonations. Many people think that the words artificial intelligence are inaccurate and very inelegant relative to AI or artificial intelligence. A far more elegant and accurate description of this new phenomena would be superior intelligence, SI, or extreme intelligence, EI, or supreme intelligence, SI. This is a poll, and I would appreciate everyone voting. What do you think is the best name for this ever-growing revolution?

Reid Hoffman (3:13)

Well, what I put in impromptu and superagency is amplification intelligence, right, because I'm very focused on how it helps human beings in terms of how it operates.

Now, in terms of that Truth Social tweet, it neglected natural stupidity or some other things as possible answers.

And so, but I think that the real question, and by the way, if I were really picking a term that I actually probably more like than artificial intelligence, it'd be synthetic intelligence.

Aria Finger (3:47)

Oh, interesting.

Reid Hoffman (3:48)

Right, because part of this synthetic intelligence is to, it's kind of like, it's not artificial, it's real intelligence, but it's being constructed in various ways. And artificial has weird echoes in human language, it's like artificial sweetener or, you know, and it's like, you know, and it is artifice, right? So that, that kind of thing, but it's kind of got a negative connotation that I think is broadly unhelpful.

Aria Finger (4:21)

And I think it also keeps some of the connotations that we were talking about, that we're not trying to mimic humans. We are not trying to replace humans, and we are not, we are trying to create an intelligence that will augment, amplify, help us do our jobs. But again, the, you know, a lot of people, especially in Silicon Valley, it's like, let's just build this. We don't want to deal with government. We don't want to deal with politics. Let's just, you know, bring about the future through technology. But this is a time when we're going to have to have politicians in Silicon Valley sort of come together for these new rules. And so on a more serious note, the AI debate in Washington.