Greylock Partners Partner Reid Hoffman Talks Our AI Future

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Let's stick with tech. The impact of generative AI under scrutiny as some investors question massive capex spending in the space. Read Halfman, the co founder of Malice AI and author of Superagency What could possibly go Right with our AI Future? Joined us now read It's good to see you. I said as you walked into the room. There's a book I need to read What Could Go Right? Because I'm very worried about what things could go wrong. Let's put

Well, the shorting answer is it gives you superpowers, right, and it gives you superpowers across a large number of things. Everyone should go try Chat, GPT, Inflections, Pie and Trapicsquad. Give it a try. You can find what should I make for dinner? How do I get medical advice that's available to me? How I am I to have a difficult conversation with a colleague, you know, how might I

And each run. Lisa under the bus, I am, do you want to share with the audience what you do?

You can manipulate what your kids look at if you send them links to things that then change their algorithms that then give them more news feeds in their in their feed. I mean there are ways that you can kind of play the system a little bit.

And I think that that's proper.

Yeah, exactly. And by the way it helps them learn, it gets some news about the environment around them. I mean, this is one of the things that is if you're not actually in fact using these AI agents to learn right now, you should. And like, for example, one of the ways that I do when I approach a difficult subject, say for example, quantum computing, I stick a technical paper in and I say, explain this to me like I'm twelve superpowers superpowers.

Yes, okay, So my next question is going to be how should we participate and how we shake this intelligence? And Lisa has given us one idea, could you give us another time?

Well, I think part of the key thing is my very first chapter is about chat GBT, where humanity enters the chat. You got hundreds of millions of people who are interacting with it, and the company watches what works and what doesn't work and then improves it. So by simply going and experimenting and getting which kind of things are the things that help you elevate your agency, then actually in fact helps the company know, oh, these things really work, Oh these things need to be improved.

At the same time, you talk about technical papers, and one thing that AI does really well is work with technical details, not so much, the social not so much. When you have to have certain biases that are baked into some of these algorithms, what are the limitations to this in sort of broad raised application at a time where people are saying this could do qualitative jobs and there could potentially be a lot of biases baked in.

So every major group is working intensely on biases. And actually, one of the things that we did with inflection and PIE personal intelligence PUN intended was to teach it to be kind and empathetic, to have EQ as important as IQ.

The reason why I find this so fascinating is because I think about my children and what careers they potentially could have, and I'm like, no, not programmer, because that's going to be dead. You know, all of these other ones. Probably if you can be empathetic human, those human skills are probably going to be more needed. That's what people say. Are you saying those two are going to go out the waydo?

I mean?

What is this due to employment?

So first, I actually think programming skill jobs aren't going out the door. I think there's human application, but I think it's also human application of like EQ as well. So the fact that you have a for example, say a medical assistant that can help you with something, or a coach that might be able to talk with something, doesn't mean you don't want a human coach. It's more coaches the better, right, and being able to make it work.

You're talking about AI for the good, but what about AI in the hands of adversaries?

Well, so superpowers superpowers for terrorists, superpowers for criminals, superpowers for rogues states. That's one of the things that we need to be careful about how we navigate. Once again, all of the major groups actually have security groups that are working on this to try to make sure and that's I think part of the having call so called red teaming plans and kind of trying to make sure that that's as minimized as much as possible.

How do think the US government should be approaching this? The market's freaked out because of deep seek and how much potentially the CCP is putting money into their version of AI. But when you're in China and you want to look at things on deep seek that are particularly critical to the CCP, it will not show you. So how does the US government go about this?

Well, So I think it's important that the US government kind of continues some of the threads that the previous executive order did, which is you have red teaming things that you actually do world leadership about what kind of things are happening. I mean, there's connections in the UK AI Safety and Suit and the US one and the French one, and I think these are important to do.

What do you make then, of the tech industry being very close to this administration. I'm not just talking about your former front Elon Musk. I was at the White House yesterday and Bill Gates was walking into the West wing for meetings. Do you think they can help the administration basically get to there faster when it comes to safe AI?

In the short absolutely, I think it's if you said, of any kind of Western democracy government the world, most especially, of course, you know, American presidency, American government, should they be connected with the tech industry talking about how tech creating the future? What are the things that we can do to make better American industry, better American society, better lives for American citizens? The short answer is absolutely.

What you make in the back lash against Dale Musk more recently about he's in film from the government, well.

In government, the move fast and break things maybe should be you know, a little bit more compassionate and judicious.

Is that what you think the apprice should be.

I think that the question should be is trying to say, hey, look, there's a reason government doesn't work like companies, even though I think there's efficiency that's really good and we need to respect those reasons too.

Do you feel that you're going to basically get some sort of repudiation because of where your politics were ahead of this election and given how Trump has basically cosied up to a lot of individuals in the tech world. I have not seen you yet at mar Lago in inauguration or walking into the West wag.

Look, I think the thing that we most want as American citizens is for our government to succeed, to succeed for our industry, succeed for our citizens, And so that's what I most want, and I think we all do.

You have been an incredible investor. You are an early investor in open Ai, You invested in LinkedIn, just so many of the behemoths currently. Do you see a lot of upstarts right now that look like they could become the next big thing in some of this machine learning technology?

So the short answer is yes, although picking them is one of the difficult things about being a venture capitalist, and there's a lot of different options. Back a few years ago, I was arguing that we were five large tech companies heading to ten. But I wouldn't necessarily have predicted that Nvidio would have so quickly become one of those, you know, into the seven and then going to ten. And so I think that's we are in that progress. And I think there are a number of startups that

What do you think the next technological evolution is going to be? They could potentially be a sort of chat GPT moment, or a deep seek moment, or one of these sort of breakthrough ahaz.

One of the things I think we're going to to see this year, all of the major AI companies are working on amplifying coding. And one of the things like, for example, you know for your kids, other things will be yes, you have to bring up the UH will be actually all of us will have a software engineering assistant and that will make all of our work a lot better. UH. And that's one of the things I think hasn't yet entered the consciousness. So I think that's

And how we can accelerate the scientific process. I say, we're all up with you on that page. You're very successful. Thank you, sir, read to appreciate your time. Thank you so good to see you. Ride half and there manus Ai and a whole lot more