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News, which is why I'm delighted to speak to Read Hoffman, not just LinkedIn co founder and Graylock partner, but a serial entrepreneur and somebody who has founded several AI companies and will continue to do so. And what I've learned is that one hundred million US dollars is the clearing price in the market for frontier model AI talent. But we're laughing, but actually that's the debate here. Why is one hundred million dollars reasonable or unreasonable?
Well, so, essentially, one of the things that's good about having an open marketplace of anything, including labor, is that you essentially get multiple bidders. And that's what's that a price. And so the fact that someone goes, I'm willing to spend one hundred million dollars in order to get this talent,
you think that's crazy. Why would it possibly higher than the vast majority of CEOs of contruc Well, if that one, what you're judging is that one talent will potentially create millions of dollars of value for you, whether it's in a social network, whether it's in you know kind of uh, you know, our search engine anything else as a way of doing it. And so if you think that, then that's just a bold bet.
What Sam Altman, the CEO of open ai, said was that that particular figure which he had accused Meta of offering to some open ai staff, what he claimed was it was crazy that he sounds like, it's not crazy.
Really, well, I don't think it's crazy when we know that AI is going to transform all businesses in all industry, in the entire tech industry. And these are trillion dollar companies et cetera at the high end and the whole stack all the way through undown in a billion today.
For a brief moment, one of them was a four trillion dollar company exactly please continue.
Yes in video. And so the uh you know, so saying hey, this piece of talent is a risk adjusted bet that that makes a difference in that that's just a risk bet. You might say it's a dumb risk bet, but it's not done to do if those are the stakes you're playing for.
I'm a student of Silicon Valley history. You were there with respect, and there was a time where CEOs would email each other, you know, and say, don't take my people, Okay, I won't if you don't take my people. We had this sort of poaching agreements saga in the mid to early two thousands. Is this different in this? Is it just the reality of a marketplace?
Well, I think it's much. Look. I think when you email and say don't take each other people, that's bad for anti trust, that's bad for labor laws, that's bad for the right thing to do relative to talented people. And obviously, as the founder of LinkedIn, I'm kind of in the hey, we should match the talent towards best possible outcome. Now, so that was a bad thing to be doing. I'm glad we're not doing it now now.
What we do still, of course want, is we want people to engage in serious work at serious companies, as opposed to like, hey, I'm being paid this much here this month and that much there this month. You've got to be like, no, no, let's get the work done. Let's build the new future. That's more of my worry on the bidding, not whatever prices it gives to.
You are no longer a board participant of open Ai, so I put that out there. But you understand the company and you understand its structure. Why is this sort of restructure held up, and is that having an impact on their ability to hire or retain talent?
Do you think I haven't heard that it's had an impact a negative impact on our ability had because everyone knows that Open Air is one of the amazing new tech companies of the current badge. I think that the restructure is it's a very challenging thing to kind of move from where a five oh one C three to where a public benefit corp, especially when you have lawsuits being filed and refiled and all of the sudden, you know,
academics saying it's a terrible thing to happen. And so I don't know exactly what the impediments are, but it's a challenging process.
If you were to guess. And again, I'm delighted to be set with you on a day where there was such newsflow Open AI and io Johnny I thing it closed. What do you suspect it is that they're building?
Well, so I don't know, I'm told, but like if it were me, I build a phone.
A phone because the reason I ask you the root of it is, every day, how do I interact with a generative AI tool, in particular through which is an app through my smartphone.
Yeah, yes, well exactly, No, No, a smartphone. And look, I'm you know, I'm a little older. I still use a you know, laptop every swapen.
You have, as I said at the top, been a serial entrepreneur. Recently, you've also backed brain implant space. Yes, that is a somewhat crowded field. Why did you move into that area?
Read Well, it's a little bit different than brain implant It's it's called SAMAI and it's ultrasound. Okay. Now, by the way, ultrasound might actually be one of the really great things for both reading and writing from the brain, because you can read but you don't have to stick things in right. And part of the reason I backed it is because they're using AI. I'm basically an AI investor to get this ultra low frequency much less energy than your phone in terms of focusing it on one
part of the brain. The tool set for creating brain therapeutics on all kinds of things, anything from anxiety, this serious dementia stuff is it's an amazing possible tool set, and that possibility is the thing I invested.
I found that so interesting that you moved into that field. I'm jumping around a bit that across all of this is the anxiety of jobs. Many of your peers have come out and made bold proclamations of how many jobs would be eliminated by AI. I've not had the chance yet to ask you for your prediction, and so may I.
So yes, So look the far future. No one really knows anyone who says definitively there's gonna be lots of fewer jobs, or definitively if there's gonna be lots more jobs. To say that definitively is to undercut the credibility of what you're saying. Now, I describe this as the cognitive industrial Revolution. I think it has the same impact as the industrial revolution, but now in like knowledge work and information work and language work and everything, there's both the
good and the bad of that. The good is none of us are of our current modern society works about the industrial revolution. That's what creates the economics and prosperity for a middle class, for democracies, for Western societies, et cetera. On the other hand, the transition is very difficult, right,
So the transition into the industrial age was challenging. So I think we're both going to get the transition, which will be a lot of job transformation, initial job loss, eventually I think job regaining and transformation and ultimately a lot of prosperity.
But we need to embrace let's titus all together through Reed Hoffman the investor. How have you adjusted your financial planning and investment strategy based on the talent what we discussed, but it also your jobs outlook.
Well, so I'm still investing a ton in AI companies and tech companies, and for example, people forg going to say, well, you don't need fewer software engineers. And actually, in fact, I think not only are we going to we're not going to need fewer. I think we'll still have they call it ten million software engineers, developers, you know kind of uh, you know across the you know, Western world.
But I think what's going to happen is actually even you are going to start doing software development because everyone's going to have a co pilot for doing some of their tasks with a software engineer helping them, right, And so we're going to have many, many more software engineers.
Reid Hoffman, Greylock partner, LinkedIn, co founder, serial founder of AI companies,