AI transcript
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deals in the show notes or at youngerprofit.com/deals. This is going to generate magic, and there will
be more agents than there are people. The future is sooner and stranger than you think. You co-founded
Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleiman, and you’re really creating companions for people. We moved
from the computers being the bicycle of mind to AI being the automobiles of the mind. Let’s figure
out how we want the technology to evolve, how we’re going to use it, how we use it together,
how we use it individually. Human beings will be replaced by other human beings using AI,
and in some cases by AI, but there will also be a bunch of new jobs created too.
Why are you so optimistic about AI? Because I think AI is going to be the,
the future is already here, it’s unevenly distributed.
Yep, gang. Welcome back to the show. Today, we are playing part two of my episode with Reed
Hoffman. Reed Hoffman is an incredible entrepreneur. He’s the co-founder of LinkedIn and Inflection
AI. In part one of this conversation, we focused on entrepreneurship, so if you haven’t heard that
yet, make sure you stop and go back and listen to that one first, especially for an entrepreneur.
We talk all about Blitzscaling. We talk about his early failures as an entrepreneur,
and he uncovered so many gems in this conversation, you don’t want to miss it.
If you’ve already heard that one, go enjoy part two of this episode on AI, where we’re going to
learn everything that he believes AI will bring to our future, including our own personal AI agents.
It was an incredible conversation. You guys are going to blow your mind with this one.
So, without further delay, here’s my conversation with the incredible Reed Hoffman.
AI is definitely transforming the world, and I know that you’re doing a lot in AI.
So, let’s start talking about that. When did you first get interested in AI
and realize its potential impact? In one sense, my undergraduate major at Stanford
was artificial intelligence. It was called symbolic systems. It was kind of the earliest
undergraduate AI major, but then I concluded the time wasn’t right, and I went off to do other things.
And then, it was discussions with a set of different people. Demesis of a city mind,
Sam Altman, Elon Musk, relative to open AI, and some other things that, okay, actually,
in fact, now is the time. And the particular thing wasn’t so much the invention of an algorithm.
A lot of the fundamentals of the kind of algorithms that are being used for the magic of today,
there’s been a bunch of inventions, but the fundamentals were already somewhat there.
What the transformation was, was essentially scale, compute, and learning machines,
and data to learn from. And it was like, oh, this is going to generate magic. Actually,
none of us are quite sure exactly all the kinds of magic that will come out of it and what
will happen once it’s GPD 5, for example. But we know we’re going to be able to create things
that are capabilities, cognitive capabilities, that have never been seen before.
And that simple ways to parallel the metaphor is like, well, actually, in fact, every single
computational device isn’t going to no longer have an interface in a manual. It’s just you’re
going to talk to it, right? Or everybody’s going to have multiple agents and assistants for everything
they’re doing, whether it’s podcasting, or writing, or analyzing, or speaking, or comprehending.
And all of this stuff is going to help. Or another way of putting it is anything that has
any computational units at all is going to become much more intelligent.
All of these things come from this scale, compute, learning revolution. And that was
probably 2014, 2015, was when I really got the vision hit me fully. And I went to my partners
at Greylock. And I said, hey, look, I think we’re going to still make a bunch of money doing the
script of stuff. I did a few things in Bitcoin and other things. So keep doing it. But I’m going
to focus entirely on AI, because I think AI is going to be the next wave. And I want to start
working on it right now. And I love how you’re so optimistic about AI. I’ve interviewed so many
people about it, Mo Gao Dat, Mustafa Suleiman, Fei Fei Li, just everyone from people who started
a long time ago on it to the new guys. And everybody kind of has a different mix. Like,
some people are really positive about it. Some people are pretty pessimistic. Why are you so
optimistic about AI? And can you give us some counter arguments to what pessimists typically
say? I’m familiar with every single pessimist argument. And the frequent thing is something
along the lines, like, let’s take the most extreme. Can you guarantee me that we won’t deliberately
or accidentally create terminators? And you go, no, I can’t guarantee you. Oh, then it’s really bad.
We should have a cautionary principle. And you’re like, well, that’s if you thought that the only
thing here was creation of terminators or not. So like, for example, take this is called existential
risk. Let’s take existential risk. Existential risk is a basket. It’s not just are there killer
robots or not. It’s also nuclear war, asteroids, pandemics, climate change, a bunch of other things.
So you say, well, if we create AI, is the basket, well, yes, we may add the terminator robots as a
negative possibility. But is the basket of risk get better or worse? And I think it just gets better,
because it’s the only way I can think of to solve pandemics. I think it’s already helping
in questions of advancing certain technologies around climate change.
There’s just the stack of things where you go, just creating it is better.
Next thing is people say, well, what about jobs? You say, well, okay, there’s basically,
I think always in the transition, there’ll be difficulties and challenges and navigating
that transition is one of the things I’m most focused on. But it’s just like the industrial
revolution with the loom and everything else and moving to the power loom. And we’re going to have
that. That’s going to have a disruption in society. There’s going to be challenges with that,
guaranteed. But on the other side, like when we look at our entire lives today of societies that
have middle classes and prosperous societies, it all comes from the industrial revolution.
So the other side of that will very much look like the similar kind of amplification of what
we’ve had here. Now, you say, what does that mean for jobs? Now, obviously, we know we need them for
economy and people’s sense of purpose and sense of commitment. And you say, look, what we’re going
to have is all this transition by which we have amplification intelligence. The thing I described
my last book before super agency impromptu, which is AI means amplification intelligence.
And so human beings will be replaced by other human beings using AI. And in some cases by AI,
but there will also be a bunch of new jobs created too. And just like we didn’t have a chance to
really envision in the future, we have to believe it’s going to happen. Now, if you said we’ve now
created our science fiction paradise of Star Trek, and no human beings need to work anymore,
what happens? By the way, that’s called a good circumstance, and we’ll figure it out. And we’ve
had societies like European and other nobility, where there was entire groups of people, classes
of people who didn’t have to work. And we may do with our lives. So even if we get there, so I think
that it will be difficulty in transition, but like an amazing outcome. And then you say, well,
why are you so passionate and so positive about this? Well, today, we have line of sight to creating
on your smartphone, a medical assistant or tutor that is better than your average doctor and is a
tutor on every subject for every age. We just need to make that available to every human to help
people, the eight plus billion of us around the world. Just by having access to a smartphone. I
think that’s one of the things that I think is super important. And that’s what we’re, like all
the doomer and gloomers, essentially are delaying that future. And that delay has a huge cost in
human suffering. Oh my gosh, I loved everything that you just said. It’s just so interesting.
And I feel like it ties a lot of things together that we’ve talked about on the podcast before.
So a lot of your book is talking about human agency, right? And the concerns around AI and
human agency, you talked about it with jobs, right? And the fact that you don’t think it’s
going to necessarily be a bad thing. If AI takes some of our jobs, it’s going to add new jobs,
will maybe become more artistic or whatever as humans and figure out our time in other ways.
But when it comes to human agency, can you talk to us about how technologies in the past,
like the telephone and cars actually had similar things so that people can understand that we’ve
gotten through this before? Thank you for reading the book and asking questions from it.
So look, what people don’t realize is every new major general purpose technology has a discourse
that’s very much like parallel to the one we’re having today, which is this new technology is
going to destroy society. When cars came out as like, oh, men, because it was mostly
men, wage earners back then, are going to stop getting married and everything else,
because they’re going to be saving up for the car and it’s going to destroy our institutions of
marriage. And these are dangerous for what happens in the streets. Similarly, for example,
when the phonograph had to be pitched, it had to be pitched as it’s going to be used for church
music, right? Because it’ll help people to like have church music at home because the kid like,
well, what are people going to do this with? Are they going to be distracted or are they going
to be sitting on their couch just like television doing nothing and television going to destroy
society, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so, and matter of fact, we had this discussion around
smartphones within our memories. And so the thing to remember is to say, yes, it’s going to completely
change the future. It’s going to change the future in the way that we experience our agency, how we
think of ourselves as kind of operative agents, what we’re capable of doing, what other people
are capable of doing. But that change has thus far always ended up being very positive. Now,
the transitions have been difficult. The printing press, which was described as, oh, it’s going to
destroy human cognition by reducing the ability of memory. It’s going to create a whole bunch of
misinformation. The true tellers in society, which in those days were priests, are going to be
undermined. And of course, since we as human beings are very bad at these kinds of transitions,
it led to nearly a century of religious war. So you go, okay, the outcome can be really good,
but what do we do about the transitions? Now, one of the things I’m pointing out in the AI context
and part of the reason for writing super agency and part of the reason for doing this is to say,
well, in fact, we can use both the lessons from the past, these technology transformations,
and we can use AI to help us. So you say, well, shoot, my job is now going to be done with a
human using AI. Well, can the AI help me learn to be that human with AI? Can the AI help me figure
out which jobs would be good for me with the AI helping me to do them? Can the AI help me with
the transition? And so what we need to be doing is learning from the past and these lessons and
transitions, and then deploying the technology to help us do that. Because one of the amazing,
unique things about AI is it’s the first technology that can do that. Previously,
you were like a doc worker, I was like, I’m a big, strong person. Well, that doesn’t help
me learn how to use a forklift, right? And now the forklift is there. And now the fact that I’m a
big, strong person doesn’t really matter, right? So my competitive edge in this job doesn’t matter.
It’s like, well, but now we have a forklift that will go, Hey, sit here, give me direction and
doing the following things. Here’s the ways that we can work together. Here’s the things that you
need to watch out for in terms of how to use me and what kinds of things to do. And here’s the
places where as I currently understand it, I’m going to be bad and need help and you can help me
with. And now I can do the job transition. So that’s the kind of thing that I think is why
agency is so important to focus on. And if you look at most of the things that people critique
about these technologies, including AI, including smartphones, including cars, is it’s this change
in agency, whether it’s like privacy or working jobs or, or capabilities by the state, by the people
that then get people to be highly concerned. And you’re like, well, actually, in fact,
if we go through it, if we do it in the right way, it’ll be magical, I think anyway, but it can be
less suffering on the path to being magical and better navigated if we do it the right way.
So when you say super agency, basically what you’re saying is we have human agency
with AI, they’ll be helping us become better humans. And that’s why we have super agency.
And then AI itself is going to be able to do things on its own, right? So can you talk to us
about how AI will have agency? And then how do we imagine humans actually interacting with AI?
I talked to Mustafa Suleiman, who I know is your colleague, and he told me like every human’s
going to have an AI companion, and it’s going to help them, you know, go on job interviews,
start companies. So talk to us about those kinds of concepts.
Part of what freaks people out a little bit is we are going to this agentic universe,
where all of a sudden, as opposed to having phones and PCs, which we’ll still have,
we’ll have agents. And by the way, we’ll have more than one. We may have one that we’re,
you know, particularly the hollow read ongoing companion always, you know, always around us
and helping us with things. But there’s going to be a suite of them with kind of different
specialties and different engagements. And by the way, you’re, you know, your office is going to
have one, your working group is going to have one, and probably your podcast is going to have one,
et cetera. And we hear fairly soon and people say, well, if they’re agentic, does that take my
agency away? And the answer is no, the same way that when you work with colleagues and you work
with employees and everything else, that expands your agency, that doesn’t take it away. So the
agency is, I think, extremely important here. But by the way, a lot of it’s kind of the mindset.
Like if you, if you think of your smartphone is, well, here’s the way that everyone can get to me
all the time when I don’t really want to. And here is this microphone and camera that’s following me
around. And I don’t know what it’s doing. Oh, gosh, I’m, I’m, I’m essentially going, oh my god, my
agency is being slaughtered. Whereas I go, no, here’s the way that I can stay in communication
with a bunch of the people I can call out to people I can be heard from people sometimes
when I want, sometimes when I don’t, but I have choice over that. It helps me navigate and never
get lost. Right. So yes, it always knows where I am. But that also knows how it helps me never
get lost. And so therefore it can be an amplification of my agency. And it changes
what the landscape of my agency is. And so I think that’s part of what’s so important about
thinking about this new, a genetic revolution. Now, some of us will also be the, hey, I talked to
my agent and I say, hey, I’m going to go to Rome, figure out what a really good itinerary is, book
anything that’s really important to book early, you know, etc. And it comes back to me and does that.
And you go, well, that’s really awesome. And you say, well, is this going to mean that the
travel agents don’t have a job anymore? I said, well, actually, in fact, travel agents will change
because it’ll be AI plus travel agent. But like, you know, it might be a little bit more along the
lines of, here’s the things that’s normally seen, like, go see the Sistine Chapel in Rome, right?
But it may be, oh, you’re the kind of person who would really like to do the after hours tour.
And this is the way you do it. And maybe agents don’t know that much about the after hours tour.
Maybe there’s a midnight bike ride that might be really good that, you know, doesn’t necessarily
know about. So there’s ways that these kind of the pulling things together. And by the way,
these agents will be making predictions off all the data, which is a lot more than any of us have,
about what things will be really good for us. But it’s like, for example, play with chat,
GBT and see what kinds of things are rights. And at least every time I’ve used it so far,
and I suspect this will also be true of GBT five and GBT six, I can always add something interesting
to it. I can change it, I can make it sharper, more distinct, etc. And that’s kind of a mode for
thinking, well, why will I always have a role in the things that really matter is because I’ll figure
out how to add something to it in a useful way, even as it gets much more powerful. Now, if you
look at it today, like one of the things that I’m a little always bemused by is people say,
I saw two articles in one day earlier this year, which was all that AI is good for is faking homework.
AI is going to destroy all jobs. And you’re like, okay, part of that’s like right now, you’re like,
look, there’s a very long way away from all this implication that everyone’s talking about. I mean,
there’s some that’s right here right now, that’s really spectacular. But there’s a long journey,
a long path, a long role for human beings to be participating in various ways and to be evolving
and changing. And I for one, look forward to that path. I have to say, thinking about agents is so
mind blowing. And when I think about AI, and all the talks that I’ve had, a lot of people talk about
it as being like a great equalizer. And we were just talking about how humans are not going to
work and everything like that. But I’m competitive, right? So like as I’ve been going through these
conversations, I’ve been thinking about like, well, how am I going to be the best version of me?
How am I going to be like a better entrepreneur and compete? But now as I’ve thought about it more,
I realized you have to be the best trainer of the AI. I kind of imagine everybody being an
entrepreneur, having agents that work at their personal company, basically, you basically have
to be the best at coordinating your agents and figuring out how to like mobilize all that AI
and all your AI support. And so smart people are going to be smarter at that, right? And creative
and innovative people are going to be more creative and innovative when it comes to their own agents.
And so I just feel like a lot of people are probably worried that there’s not going to be any
room for them to your point as humans. But I really think it’s going to be how you manage your AI.
Exactly as you say, in addition to training, it’s also deploying, organizing, executing,
strategizing all of the above. And that’s part of the reason why with super agency and the other
content that I’ve been trying to get out there and people’s hands like, start playing with it,
start exploring, because you want to start building the muscles. It’s kind of like, hey,
what is locomotion going to look like now? We’ve just invented, we’ve moved from the computers
being the bicycle of mind to AI being the automobiles of the mind. All right, let’s all go learn how
to drive, right? Let’s figure out how these things work, how we want the technology to evolve, how
we’re going to use it, how we use it together, how we use it individually, and getting engaged with
it is really important. And that’s the most central thing. And again, part of the reason I called it
agency, because it’s like, own your agency and go do it. And part of the super agency is when
millions of us all start doing that, it benefits all of us much more than just even the technology
benefits each of us individually by ourselves. Let’s hold that thought and take a quick break
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So I know that you co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Selimon, and one of your big missions
there is to create companions that have high emotional intelligence for humans. It’s not a
workplace tool. You’re really creating companions for people. Why do you think that’s important
and what gap did you see in the AI world? Why did you get on board with that?
So that’s how we started with Inflection. And part of that was because we said, well,
what’s the world that we see that necessarily people don’t see that could be a very good product
to create? Entrepreneur 1, right? And we said, look, this agent, eugenic world coming, there’s
going to be more agents than people. Everyone’s going to have an agent that’s their own personal
agent that they have trust with and is on their side. And what are the key attributes of that?
Because if you look at even the very earliest of how other people were thinking about agents,
they were thinking about information processing and work. And we were thinking about this as
a trusted companion for how you’d operate. And so EQ is as important as IQ. So we trained the
Inflection Model Pi, personal intelligence on this. Now, we’ve since then, we spoke about
pivots earlier, we’ve pivoted the business. The consumer application of that is now being run
as part of things that Microsoft’s doing. And what Inflection the company is doing now is providing
that same kind of best in class IQ, but also best in class EQ to businesses that want to deploy
this within their ecosystem, to their customers, to their products and services. So it’s shifted
to kind of a more of a B2B model where the Pi agent is more the kind of exemplar of one of the
unique models that Inflection has that it can deploy for your particular business challenges.
So it’s a classic startup journey in addition to being in an interesting evolution of the AI
things. And when it comes to having good EQ, I know obviously AI is not conscious, right?
So how do you actually train it to have empathy and things like that?
Part of what you’re doing when you’re doing the training of an AI is you’re training it
to say it’s this prompt completion, like what do you say after this is said? And part of what
you’re doing both in data and in post training is you’re saying, okay, here’s the kinds of things
that count as good saying. So you have a whole bunch of humans who are running the system through
and saying, okay, to prompt one, like you say, the person says, how’s your day? And says, well,
my pet died today. And is it why respond A or respond B? Which one’s better response? And then
human beings respond to that. That’s part of how it gets aligned with our beings, part of how it
gets to kind of an EQ. And you’re partially telling your human beings who are training this
where you want to nudge and prompt the responses to so that they’re essentially doing the training
for this. And so if it said, for example, option A, oh, that’s too bad, you should really look up a
grief counselor. And option two was, oh, that must be really hard. Oh, my gosh, is there anything I
can do to help? I feel for you. Or, you know, probably wouldn’t say that just because it’s an AI,
but it’s like something else because you don’t want to make false anthem or worse thing. But
it’s like, look, I’m certain that connecting with friends or other kinds of things, how can I be of
most help? And shouldn’t you want to have a conversation about it? That would be the kind
of thing as all B is better than A, right? And so then by that, it learns how to have empathetic,
kind, compassionate conversations. Because you can do that even without necessarily being
compassionate or empathetic yourself, because as you noted, it’s not conscious. And by the way,
there’s bunch of human beings who are also not there empathetic, who learn to be more empathetic,
just by, you know, kind of, okay, this is the way you do this.
It’s really cool what you guys are doing at Inflection AI. So one of the things that I wanted
to talk to you about was trust when it comes to AI, because I feel like a lot of people are worried
about misinformation. There’s so many deep fakes out there. People are just worried about trust
when it comes to AI. So what are your thoughts around that? Look, trust is in, unfortunately,
short supply these days, generally, not just for the AI. Trust in institutions, trust in
democracies, voting systems, other people’s intent, you know, other kinds of things. So trust
is challenging. Now, the way that I think it’s going to be very important to build and maintain
trust with AI is for the people who are building it to be very clear about what their goals are,
what they’re doing, what they’re doing to try to build and maintain trust. Part of the reason why,
of course, my encouragement with super agency is for people to go try it because as they begin
to try it and learn what kinds of good things they can do, what kinds of things are going to be
empowered, that will be the kind of thing that builds the kind of positive trust in these kinds
of circumstances. And my advice to individuals encountering these things, like, you know, a
classic suspicion is say, well, big tech companies who are trying to make a lot of money are building
these things and they’re trying to make money from you. And I was like, well, by the way,
trying to make money from you is usually offering you a product and service you really like that
really is something that you come back for that you keep using. That’s good for you. That’s the
goodness of modern business. So you go, okay, so which things should I trust these AIs on or
which things should I not? And the answer is, well, if you generally should and you should
understand that company is trying to have you as a lifelong loyal customer that generally speaking,
most of them are smart about doing that. So they’re going to try to make it good.
If it’s something that’s particularly important to you cross-checking, it’s important. Like, you
know, when I go to GBD4 and get a prompt, then I go, you know, huh, that doesn’t really make full
sense to me. I’m going to go look at this a little bit more. Because it’s like, okay, if it said
something about like, yeah, your lab, your, you know, your black lab can eat that mushroom. It’s
like, nah, I really want to know. Yeah, double-check that. You know, so, and so you, you know, that
kind of thing. And by the way, over time, these will get better and better for how it operates.
And so I think that’s the kind of thing, but I think that’s the only by engaging and using,
having dialogue, having that dialogue match our experience over time, being accountable as creators
and companies for, you know, here are the things that we want in the use. And here are the things
that are still under development. And being clear about that so that people have a sense of, okay,
I understand it’s not perfect, but it could be really good for me. I feel like we’re in this
transition period where humans that have a specialized expertise right now are at such an
advantage. So for example, I have a podcast network. And I’m probably one of the most knowledgeable
people about monetizing podcasts. And I write a newsletter that I write personally with all
my industry knowledge. And sometimes I’ll just be like, well, what would chat GBT say? And then
it’s all wrong. And it’s just so basic, right? It’s so basic. It’s kind of wrong. And then I just
love it because I’m like, okay, people are getting my newsletter, which is this human experience that
they can’t get anymore. And it’s making me feel like I actually am more valuable. I think it will
transition where that might not be the case in like two years, but I feel like we’re in this
transition where specialized knowledge from humans is actually like really desirable.
Broadly, yes. And part of it’s obviously that specialized knowledge being evolved with how
you’re figuring out how to use like you made this comment earlier, how you use these new
tools really effectively. And so even with a depth of experience, the early involvement with open AI
and all that, I constantly am asking questions and trying to use a number of these tools myself
for real things, not just like create a sonnet for my cousin’s birthday or any of this kind of
stuff, but it’s also things like investment analysis or market trends or other kinds of things.
And frequently, just as you said, you know, like, ah, that’s not very good. Okay, fine.
And sometimes I go, I iterate on it. And sometimes I go, oh, no, no, I think that’s just not very
good right now. I’ll use it for other things, but using it constantly. So I have, I’ve enabled the
voice agents on my phones so that I can point my camera at things and talk to chat, GBT about
the thing I’m looking at, say mushrooms, right? And so, and you know, that kind of thing as a
way of understanding it. And I do think that human specialized knowledge creativity will even grow
with a premium, but it will grow at a premium in the use of the tools too. Like you can’t just buy,
like, I am genius. I don’t need AI. It’s like, no, I am genius because of the way that I use AI
to be an extra special genius. We were talking about deep bakes before. And I came across this
interview of you interviewing your own AI on your YouTube, you call it read AI, and it’s an
AI video avatar of you. Talk to us about how you felt in that interview. Did you learn anything
from it? Did you help you realize anything about AI in the future? It came about primarily because
I was like, look, here’s a technology that everyone’s so skeptical about. Our name for it is deep fakes.
It’s kind of like if your name was disaster, okay. So I was like, okay, but can I imagine that there
would possibly be good things that could work with this? And I was like, well, let’s explore because
we should. And let’s share the exploration. So we’ll have this kind of interview and conversation.
And as I said at the end of the interview, I thought I was going to hate this because I’m not
one of those people who talks to myself in a mirror. I was like, am I going to feel schizophrenic?
Am I going to feel self and grandizing? Am I going to feel like I can see all these different ways
that I could possibly hate this thing? And actually it was more interesting as kind of a palette and
exploration. Like if you said, well, I only want to talk to read AI, so absolutely not. But what I
want to talk to read AI sometimes and doing these things and have that as a way of having a dialogue
with myself and also showing what’s good at, because once I did that, one of the things I
realized is after I made that, I was off to go give a speech at the University of Perugia
in defense of an honorary doctorate. And I sort of wrote out the speech. And then I went, you know,
I could actually have read AI, give this speech. And I’m only really fluent in English
in all of these other languages, ranging from Hindi to Chinese to Arabic to all these things.
And to give the speech in those languages where people are much like, it was bizarre listening
to me, my voice, speaking Hindi or Chinese fluently. It’s like, what would I sound like
if I were speaking Chinese? Now, one of the things that my French friends told me is my
French sounded like Canadian French. And you know, I don’t know what the story of that is.
How is this? Is there more data audio samples of Canadian French or somehow it goes, well,
you’re North American, so we’re going to make you from Quebec rather than Putty? Who knows?
But it was humanizing. I thought I would really dislike it. And it was humanizing. And it started
making me realize just as I say to other people, hey, you should use the technology to get a sense
of it and to reinforce your own agency with the technology. It was like, that was me doing that
with that. And we continue to do new things with read AI. Probably one of the funniest ones
was the number of different press outlets that asked, we’d like to do an interview with read AI.
It was like, oh, that’s interesting. Cool. Yeah, it’s so cool. I feel like in terms of
content creation, I’ve got a lot of creator entrepreneurs that listen to the show. I feel
like AI is totally going to change the game. Even with me, I have my AI voice if I’m sick,
or if I miss a commercial, we can use my AI voice as an intermediate step. I’ll always rerecord it,
make sure that it’s me. But it’s really close to my voice. People really can’t tell. And we’re
working on my AI video. And to your point, people probably think I’m crazy creating my own deep bake.
But I want to be able to scale myself. And this is the future. And you just gave me such a great
idea in terms of the translations. People love to watch content all over the world, and not everybody
speaks English. Not only do I speak English, but also people most emotionally resonate with content
that’s in languages that they are native to. And so most people are native one language. Sometimes
they’re native a couple, but it’s within the languages they’re native to, which roughly means
languages they learn complete fluency before they were 12 for the vast majority of people.
It’s a human connection. If the person says, oh, I’m hearing this in Chinese, it’s warmer,
it’s smarter, it’s more engaging, et cetera, if Chinese is my native language.
I do feel like people who have a lot of content out there have a very unique advantage
going into the future because we can actually create these avatars with ourselves because
we have all this content. Absolutely. We’ll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors.
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One last question for you on the future of AI. So you’re obviously at the forefront of this.
You’ve thought a lot about it. You’ve written books on AI. So I just want you and you can take
your time with us because I think it’s very interesting. How do you imagine our world to be
five, 10, 20 years in the future with AI? What do you imagine the world to be like?
Well, one of the things that’s a great way to look foolish in the future is to make overly
specific predictions, partially because the usual principle I used to say in this is the future is
sooner and stranger than you think. And so people thought in the ’80s, we’re going to get AI, but
if we didn’t get AI, we got the internet, we got mobile phone. Well, maybe now we’re going to get
AI. I mean, we’re going to get what shape of AI is the interesting question. What I think is
the minimum guarantee is there’s going to be, as opposed to computer interfaces or phone interfaces,
we’re going to have agents. And agents are going to be the primary mode of navigation. What we
describe in super agency is an informational GPS. So in this entire informational digital world,
we’ll do that. And there will be more agents than there are people, especially when you consider
even though there might be just one agent, Pi, that’s kind of then instantiated with what remembers
out of its conversations and interactions with Hala, what it understands, remembers in its
conversation, interactions with Reed, et cetera, et cetera, this kind of this flow of agents. Now,
one of the things that I think people haven’t really fully tracked yet, but I think what we’re
interesting is how agents end up talking to each other. Because when we have that many agents,
part of how you and I are going to coordinate, like we say, hey, what should we talk about in the
podcast? Well, one of our preps will be your agent, we’ll talk to my agent. And they’ll kind of go,
well, you know, these topics will be really good. And, you know, hey, when you ask a question this
way, it’ll be great. And when you answer it this way, it’ll be great. And that kind of thing,
or this could be a really new interesting thing to try. And that will be part of the world that we
will be in. And I think that part of that will then make the premium on thinking creatively,
thinking differently. You know, as you mentioned, we’ll be much higher. My guess is, for example,
if you go back 30 years, and you told someone there would be these jobs called web designer,
data scientist, other things, they go, what are you talking about? You know, crazy person from
the future. And I think that’s another thing that we’re going to see even more of, which is like,
oh, didn’t realize that was going to be the job. Huh. And that’s cool. Those are some of the things,
but I try not to make overly specific predictions because usually there may all put it this way.
William Gibson, science fiction author, has a really good quote, which is,
“The future is already here. It’s unevenly distributed.” He’s been a great neural mancer,
it was the internet, everything else. Now, he was being asked in an interview,
“How did you see the future?” And he’s like, “Look, thank you for the compliment. But by the way,
if you read neural mancer, sure, I got AI right. I got the internet right. I missed the mobile phone.”
And so that’s the kind of thing that we’re always looking for is that surprise and delight moment.
And who knows with AI to your point, like, we have no idea what we’re going to see.
I’m excited to see it unfold. Okay, so I end my show with two questions. I ask all of my guests.
The first, and you can just answer however you’d like, doesn’t have to be about anything we talked
about today. What is one actionable thing our young and profitors can do today to become more
profitable tomorrow? So to become more profitable tomorrow, I guess I won’t say literally tomorrow,
right, since one day, 24 hour. I would say the important thing, you know, and this is kind of
part of how I think about the world, the important thing is to be thinking about what do you think
the environment your business is going to be in in one, three, and five years? And what do you
think that environment is going to be changing based on patterns of technology? What do you think
that’s going to be changing on patterns of competition? What do you think that’s going to
be changing in patterns of how you deliver your business, supply chain, et cetera? And so by looking
at that probable guess, how do you run the experiment today that informs you about which big choices
you need to make in that one, three, and five year timeframe? The experiment won’t necessarily make
you profitable, but the experiment may give you the thing that either gets you to more profit or
also helps you navigate the changes, which things are the new living creatures and which
things the dinosaurs in the future market. Great advice. And what is your secret to
profiting in life? And this can go beyond financial profiting in all aspects of life.
Fundamentally, part of why in the startup of you, I said life is a team sport,
because the startup of you is actually advice I give to entrepreneurs,
refactored to individuals being the entrepreneur of their own life. So it actually applies to
founders, applies to CEOs, applies to executives, applies to people working. But it’s the question
about life being a team sport. It’s you are amplified by your team. It’s more fun. You learn more,
and they help you in both upside and navigating downside. So the most fundamental thing,
life is a team sport. And now we’re going to have agents with our team.
Exactly. Amongst our team. Yes, with our team. We’ll also have agents, and everybody will have
agents. Reed, this has been such an awesome conversation. I really appreciate all your time,
all your wisdom. Where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do?
Well, LinkedIn. I post just about everything there. I also have readoffman.org and this year,
Publishing Super Agency. Amazing. I highly recommend everybody go get Super Agency,
also get Blitzscaling. I love that book as well. Reed, thank you so much for your time today.
Thank you for joining us on Young and Profiting Podcast.
A great pleasure. I look forward to our next conversation.
Okay, guys, that’s the second installment of my two-part conversation with the amazing Reed
Hoffman. He had so many great insights about how we should think about AI and where it’s
headed. And I’ve got so many takeaways from this conversation, but here’s my most important
takeaways from this chat. First, big picture. New technology changes industries. And that’s
what AI is going to do, and that’s what it’s going to do to your industry. So you need to get in
front of it and ask, what does this technology mean for my business, my product, or service,
and how will we operate as a company to get ahead of this? Technology also breeds fear and paranoia.
And the conversation that mean Reed had about the potential harms of AI is one that society has had
for all the other major innovations as well, from the printing press to the smartphone.
People are always scared of new technology. And we should be having these conversations,
but like Reed said, we should also recognize that most of our fears about these innovations
actually don’t come to pass. And we live in a better world because of them. And the world we
could live in, thanks to the advances in AI, could be truly transformational. As Reed put it,
if we do it the right way, it could be magical. Put simply, AI means amplification intelligence.
We’re going to be having AI agents on our phones and devices that become our personal
assistants, our tutors, our medical and financial advisors, and so much more. We’re going to be
having capabilities at our fingertips that we can’t even imagine today. We can’t even foresee
what the future is going to be like. And when you think about who’s going to thrive and flourish
in this world of super agents, it’s going to be the people who have managerial experience.
It’s going to be the entrepreneurs, young and profitors. We are the most equipped to handle
this AI revolution because we’re creative, industrious, innovative. We know how to manage,
delegate, motivate. We know how to let go of control. We know how to handle this young and
profitors. AI is going to multiply what you’re capable of. It is not going to replace you or
your business. We’re going to ride this wave, young and profitors. Thanks for listening to
this episode of Young and Profiting Podcast. If you listen, learned and profited from this
conversation with the legendary Reed Hoffman, please share this episode with somebody who’d
love it. And guys, I’ve been loving reading your reviews. So many of you are leaving reviews every
day on Apple, Spotify, Cast Box, Player of Fame, wherever you listen to your podcasts.
And it just means the world to me. I love to read your reviews. It makes me feel motivated.
It’s great for our social proof. And I’d love for you guys to drop a review and help spread
this podcast by word of mouth. Young and profiting is a gem for all the entrepreneurs out there.
Please tell your friends, tell your family, tell your colleagues, tell all the entrepreneurs in
your life that they’ve got to listen to Young and Profiting Podcasts. If you guys like to watch
your podcast’s videos, I’ve been doing all this amazing YouTube content. My YouTube channel just
hit 50k subscribers, which is much smaller than my audio channels, but I’m going to invest super
heavily into video this year. And I just interviewed Mel Robbins in person. I interviewed Gary Vee in
person. I just had Sahil Bloom in person that didn’t come out yet. So I’m doing so many more
in person videos. And I absolutely love it. It’s making me a better interviewer. It is just so
much better for chemistry. And I’ve just been really digging it. So check out YouTube for all
the video content. If you guys want to follow me on social media, I always post like fun stories
about my life on Instagram @yapwithhala. Put a face behind the name. Why not? You can also find
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production team. If you guys don’t know, I have an award-winning social media and podcast agency.
It is my podcast agency that runs this podcast. I also have a podcast network that gets me
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world. We’re so picky about who we hire. So we’ve got the A+ team at YAP who puts out A+ work
and that’s why we got A+ Money in the Bank. This is your host, Halataha, aka the podcast princess,
signing off.
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deals in the show notes or at youngerprofit.com/deals. This is going to generate magic, and there will
be more agents than there are people. The future is sooner and stranger than you think. You co-founded
Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleiman, and you’re really creating companions for people. We moved
from the computers being the bicycle of mind to AI being the automobiles of the mind. Let’s figure
out how we want the technology to evolve, how we’re going to use it, how we use it together,
how we use it individually. Human beings will be replaced by other human beings using AI,
and in some cases by AI, but there will also be a bunch of new jobs created too.
Why are you so optimistic about AI? Because I think AI is going to be the,
the future is already here, it’s unevenly distributed.
Yep, gang. Welcome back to the show. Today, we are playing part two of my episode with Reed
Hoffman. Reed Hoffman is an incredible entrepreneur. He’s the co-founder of LinkedIn and Inflection
AI. In part one of this conversation, we focused on entrepreneurship, so if you haven’t heard that
yet, make sure you stop and go back and listen to that one first, especially for an entrepreneur.
We talk all about Blitzscaling. We talk about his early failures as an entrepreneur,
and he uncovered so many gems in this conversation, you don’t want to miss it.
If you’ve already heard that one, go enjoy part two of this episode on AI, where we’re going to
learn everything that he believes AI will bring to our future, including our own personal AI agents.
It was an incredible conversation. You guys are going to blow your mind with this one.
So, without further delay, here’s my conversation with the incredible Reed Hoffman.
AI is definitely transforming the world, and I know that you’re doing a lot in AI.
So, let’s start talking about that. When did you first get interested in AI
and realize its potential impact? In one sense, my undergraduate major at Stanford
was artificial intelligence. It was called symbolic systems. It was kind of the earliest
undergraduate AI major, but then I concluded the time wasn’t right, and I went off to do other things.
And then, it was discussions with a set of different people. Demesis of a city mind,
Sam Altman, Elon Musk, relative to open AI, and some other things that, okay, actually,
in fact, now is the time. And the particular thing wasn’t so much the invention of an algorithm.
A lot of the fundamentals of the kind of algorithms that are being used for the magic of today,
there’s been a bunch of inventions, but the fundamentals were already somewhat there.
What the transformation was, was essentially scale, compute, and learning machines,
and data to learn from. And it was like, oh, this is going to generate magic. Actually,
none of us are quite sure exactly all the kinds of magic that will come out of it and what
will happen once it’s GPD 5, for example. But we know we’re going to be able to create things
that are capabilities, cognitive capabilities, that have never been seen before.
And that simple ways to parallel the metaphor is like, well, actually, in fact, every single
computational device isn’t going to no longer have an interface in a manual. It’s just you’re
going to talk to it, right? Or everybody’s going to have multiple agents and assistants for everything
they’re doing, whether it’s podcasting, or writing, or analyzing, or speaking, or comprehending.
And all of this stuff is going to help. Or another way of putting it is anything that has
any computational units at all is going to become much more intelligent.
All of these things come from this scale, compute, learning revolution. And that was
probably 2014, 2015, was when I really got the vision hit me fully. And I went to my partners
at Greylock. And I said, hey, look, I think we’re going to still make a bunch of money doing the
script of stuff. I did a few things in Bitcoin and other things. So keep doing it. But I’m going
to focus entirely on AI, because I think AI is going to be the next wave. And I want to start
working on it right now. And I love how you’re so optimistic about AI. I’ve interviewed so many
people about it, Mo Gao Dat, Mustafa Suleiman, Fei Fei Li, just everyone from people who started
a long time ago on it to the new guys. And everybody kind of has a different mix. Like,
some people are really positive about it. Some people are pretty pessimistic. Why are you so
optimistic about AI? And can you give us some counter arguments to what pessimists typically
say? I’m familiar with every single pessimist argument. And the frequent thing is something
along the lines, like, let’s take the most extreme. Can you guarantee me that we won’t deliberately
or accidentally create terminators? And you go, no, I can’t guarantee you. Oh, then it’s really bad.
We should have a cautionary principle. And you’re like, well, that’s if you thought that the only
thing here was creation of terminators or not. So like, for example, take this is called existential
risk. Let’s take existential risk. Existential risk is a basket. It’s not just are there killer
robots or not. It’s also nuclear war, asteroids, pandemics, climate change, a bunch of other things.
So you say, well, if we create AI, is the basket, well, yes, we may add the terminator robots as a
negative possibility. But is the basket of risk get better or worse? And I think it just gets better,
because it’s the only way I can think of to solve pandemics. I think it’s already helping
in questions of advancing certain technologies around climate change.
There’s just the stack of things where you go, just creating it is better.
Next thing is people say, well, what about jobs? You say, well, okay, there’s basically,
I think always in the transition, there’ll be difficulties and challenges and navigating
that transition is one of the things I’m most focused on. But it’s just like the industrial
revolution with the loom and everything else and moving to the power loom. And we’re going to have
that. That’s going to have a disruption in society. There’s going to be challenges with that,
guaranteed. But on the other side, like when we look at our entire lives today of societies that
have middle classes and prosperous societies, it all comes from the industrial revolution.
So the other side of that will very much look like the similar kind of amplification of what
we’ve had here. Now, you say, what does that mean for jobs? Now, obviously, we know we need them for
economy and people’s sense of purpose and sense of commitment. And you say, look, what we’re going
to have is all this transition by which we have amplification intelligence. The thing I described
my last book before super agency impromptu, which is AI means amplification intelligence.
And so human beings will be replaced by other human beings using AI. And in some cases by AI,
but there will also be a bunch of new jobs created too. And just like we didn’t have a chance to
really envision in the future, we have to believe it’s going to happen. Now, if you said we’ve now
created our science fiction paradise of Star Trek, and no human beings need to work anymore,
what happens? By the way, that’s called a good circumstance, and we’ll figure it out. And we’ve
had societies like European and other nobility, where there was entire groups of people, classes
of people who didn’t have to work. And we may do with our lives. So even if we get there, so I think
that it will be difficulty in transition, but like an amazing outcome. And then you say, well,
why are you so passionate and so positive about this? Well, today, we have line of sight to creating
on your smartphone, a medical assistant or tutor that is better than your average doctor and is a
tutor on every subject for every age. We just need to make that available to every human to help
people, the eight plus billion of us around the world. Just by having access to a smartphone. I
think that’s one of the things that I think is super important. And that’s what we’re, like all
the doomer and gloomers, essentially are delaying that future. And that delay has a huge cost in
human suffering. Oh my gosh, I loved everything that you just said. It’s just so interesting.
And I feel like it ties a lot of things together that we’ve talked about on the podcast before.
So a lot of your book is talking about human agency, right? And the concerns around AI and
human agency, you talked about it with jobs, right? And the fact that you don’t think it’s
going to necessarily be a bad thing. If AI takes some of our jobs, it’s going to add new jobs,
will maybe become more artistic or whatever as humans and figure out our time in other ways.
But when it comes to human agency, can you talk to us about how technologies in the past,
like the telephone and cars actually had similar things so that people can understand that we’ve
gotten through this before? Thank you for reading the book and asking questions from it.
So look, what people don’t realize is every new major general purpose technology has a discourse
that’s very much like parallel to the one we’re having today, which is this new technology is
going to destroy society. When cars came out as like, oh, men, because it was mostly
men, wage earners back then, are going to stop getting married and everything else,
because they’re going to be saving up for the car and it’s going to destroy our institutions of
marriage. And these are dangerous for what happens in the streets. Similarly, for example,
when the phonograph had to be pitched, it had to be pitched as it’s going to be used for church
music, right? Because it’ll help people to like have church music at home because the kid like,
well, what are people going to do this with? Are they going to be distracted or are they going
to be sitting on their couch just like television doing nothing and television going to destroy
society, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so, and matter of fact, we had this discussion around
smartphones within our memories. And so the thing to remember is to say, yes, it’s going to completely
change the future. It’s going to change the future in the way that we experience our agency, how we
think of ourselves as kind of operative agents, what we’re capable of doing, what other people
are capable of doing. But that change has thus far always ended up being very positive. Now,
the transitions have been difficult. The printing press, which was described as, oh, it’s going to
destroy human cognition by reducing the ability of memory. It’s going to create a whole bunch of
misinformation. The true tellers in society, which in those days were priests, are going to be
undermined. And of course, since we as human beings are very bad at these kinds of transitions,
it led to nearly a century of religious war. So you go, okay, the outcome can be really good,
but what do we do about the transitions? Now, one of the things I’m pointing out in the AI context
and part of the reason for writing super agency and part of the reason for doing this is to say,
well, in fact, we can use both the lessons from the past, these technology transformations,
and we can use AI to help us. So you say, well, shoot, my job is now going to be done with a
human using AI. Well, can the AI help me learn to be that human with AI? Can the AI help me figure
out which jobs would be good for me with the AI helping me to do them? Can the AI help me with
the transition? And so what we need to be doing is learning from the past and these lessons and
transitions, and then deploying the technology to help us do that. Because one of the amazing,
unique things about AI is it’s the first technology that can do that. Previously,
you were like a doc worker, I was like, I’m a big, strong person. Well, that doesn’t help
me learn how to use a forklift, right? And now the forklift is there. And now the fact that I’m a
big, strong person doesn’t really matter, right? So my competitive edge in this job doesn’t matter.
It’s like, well, but now we have a forklift that will go, Hey, sit here, give me direction and
doing the following things. Here’s the ways that we can work together. Here’s the things that you
need to watch out for in terms of how to use me and what kinds of things to do. And here’s the
places where as I currently understand it, I’m going to be bad and need help and you can help me
with. And now I can do the job transition. So that’s the kind of thing that I think is why
agency is so important to focus on. And if you look at most of the things that people critique
about these technologies, including AI, including smartphones, including cars, is it’s this change
in agency, whether it’s like privacy or working jobs or, or capabilities by the state, by the people
that then get people to be highly concerned. And you’re like, well, actually, in fact,
if we go through it, if we do it in the right way, it’ll be magical, I think anyway, but it can be
less suffering on the path to being magical and better navigated if we do it the right way.
So when you say super agency, basically what you’re saying is we have human agency
with AI, they’ll be helping us become better humans. And that’s why we have super agency.
And then AI itself is going to be able to do things on its own, right? So can you talk to us
about how AI will have agency? And then how do we imagine humans actually interacting with AI?
I talked to Mustafa Suleiman, who I know is your colleague, and he told me like every human’s
going to have an AI companion, and it’s going to help them, you know, go on job interviews,
start companies. So talk to us about those kinds of concepts.
Part of what freaks people out a little bit is we are going to this agentic universe,
where all of a sudden, as opposed to having phones and PCs, which we’ll still have,
we’ll have agents. And by the way, we’ll have more than one. We may have one that we’re,
you know, particularly the hollow read ongoing companion always, you know, always around us
and helping us with things. But there’s going to be a suite of them with kind of different
specialties and different engagements. And by the way, you’re, you know, your office is going to
have one, your working group is going to have one, and probably your podcast is going to have one,
et cetera. And we hear fairly soon and people say, well, if they’re agentic, does that take my
agency away? And the answer is no, the same way that when you work with colleagues and you work
with employees and everything else, that expands your agency, that doesn’t take it away. So the
agency is, I think, extremely important here. But by the way, a lot of it’s kind of the mindset.
Like if you, if you think of your smartphone is, well, here’s the way that everyone can get to me
all the time when I don’t really want to. And here is this microphone and camera that’s following me
around. And I don’t know what it’s doing. Oh, gosh, I’m, I’m, I’m essentially going, oh my god, my
agency is being slaughtered. Whereas I go, no, here’s the way that I can stay in communication
with a bunch of the people I can call out to people I can be heard from people sometimes
when I want, sometimes when I don’t, but I have choice over that. It helps me navigate and never
get lost. Right. So yes, it always knows where I am. But that also knows how it helps me never
get lost. And so therefore it can be an amplification of my agency. And it changes
what the landscape of my agency is. And so I think that’s part of what’s so important about
thinking about this new, a genetic revolution. Now, some of us will also be the, hey, I talked to
my agent and I say, hey, I’m going to go to Rome, figure out what a really good itinerary is, book
anything that’s really important to book early, you know, etc. And it comes back to me and does that.
And you go, well, that’s really awesome. And you say, well, is this going to mean that the
travel agents don’t have a job anymore? I said, well, actually, in fact, travel agents will change
because it’ll be AI plus travel agent. But like, you know, it might be a little bit more along the
lines of, here’s the things that’s normally seen, like, go see the Sistine Chapel in Rome, right?
But it may be, oh, you’re the kind of person who would really like to do the after hours tour.
And this is the way you do it. And maybe agents don’t know that much about the after hours tour.
Maybe there’s a midnight bike ride that might be really good that, you know, doesn’t necessarily
know about. So there’s ways that these kind of the pulling things together. And by the way,
these agents will be making predictions off all the data, which is a lot more than any of us have,
about what things will be really good for us. But it’s like, for example, play with chat,
GBT and see what kinds of things are rights. And at least every time I’ve used it so far,
and I suspect this will also be true of GBT five and GBT six, I can always add something interesting
to it. I can change it, I can make it sharper, more distinct, etc. And that’s kind of a mode for
thinking, well, why will I always have a role in the things that really matter is because I’ll figure
out how to add something to it in a useful way, even as it gets much more powerful. Now, if you
look at it today, like one of the things that I’m a little always bemused by is people say,
I saw two articles in one day earlier this year, which was all that AI is good for is faking homework.
AI is going to destroy all jobs. And you’re like, okay, part of that’s like right now, you’re like,
look, there’s a very long way away from all this implication that everyone’s talking about. I mean,
there’s some that’s right here right now, that’s really spectacular. But there’s a long journey,
a long path, a long role for human beings to be participating in various ways and to be evolving
and changing. And I for one, look forward to that path. I have to say, thinking about agents is so
mind blowing. And when I think about AI, and all the talks that I’ve had, a lot of people talk about
it as being like a great equalizer. And we were just talking about how humans are not going to
work and everything like that. But I’m competitive, right? So like as I’ve been going through these
conversations, I’ve been thinking about like, well, how am I going to be the best version of me?
How am I going to be like a better entrepreneur and compete? But now as I’ve thought about it more,
I realized you have to be the best trainer of the AI. I kind of imagine everybody being an
entrepreneur, having agents that work at their personal company, basically, you basically have
to be the best at coordinating your agents and figuring out how to like mobilize all that AI
and all your AI support. And so smart people are going to be smarter at that, right? And creative
and innovative people are going to be more creative and innovative when it comes to their own agents.
And so I just feel like a lot of people are probably worried that there’s not going to be any
room for them to your point as humans. But I really think it’s going to be how you manage your AI.
Exactly as you say, in addition to training, it’s also deploying, organizing, executing,
strategizing all of the above. And that’s part of the reason why with super agency and the other
content that I’ve been trying to get out there and people’s hands like, start playing with it,
start exploring, because you want to start building the muscles. It’s kind of like, hey,
what is locomotion going to look like now? We’ve just invented, we’ve moved from the computers
being the bicycle of mind to AI being the automobiles of the mind. All right, let’s all go learn how
to drive, right? Let’s figure out how these things work, how we want the technology to evolve, how
we’re going to use it, how we use it together, how we use it individually, and getting engaged with
it is really important. And that’s the most central thing. And again, part of the reason I called it
agency, because it’s like, own your agency and go do it. And part of the super agency is when
millions of us all start doing that, it benefits all of us much more than just even the technology
benefits each of us individually by ourselves. Let’s hold that thought and take a quick break
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So I know that you co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Selimon, and one of your big missions
there is to create companions that have high emotional intelligence for humans. It’s not a
workplace tool. You’re really creating companions for people. Why do you think that’s important
and what gap did you see in the AI world? Why did you get on board with that?
So that’s how we started with Inflection. And part of that was because we said, well,
what’s the world that we see that necessarily people don’t see that could be a very good product
to create? Entrepreneur 1, right? And we said, look, this agent, eugenic world coming, there’s
going to be more agents than people. Everyone’s going to have an agent that’s their own personal
agent that they have trust with and is on their side. And what are the key attributes of that?
Because if you look at even the very earliest of how other people were thinking about agents,
they were thinking about information processing and work. And we were thinking about this as
a trusted companion for how you’d operate. And so EQ is as important as IQ. So we trained the
Inflection Model Pi, personal intelligence on this. Now, we’ve since then, we spoke about
pivots earlier, we’ve pivoted the business. The consumer application of that is now being run
as part of things that Microsoft’s doing. And what Inflection the company is doing now is providing
that same kind of best in class IQ, but also best in class EQ to businesses that want to deploy
this within their ecosystem, to their customers, to their products and services. So it’s shifted
to kind of a more of a B2B model where the Pi agent is more the kind of exemplar of one of the
unique models that Inflection has that it can deploy for your particular business challenges.
So it’s a classic startup journey in addition to being in an interesting evolution of the AI
things. And when it comes to having good EQ, I know obviously AI is not conscious, right?
So how do you actually train it to have empathy and things like that?
Part of what you’re doing when you’re doing the training of an AI is you’re training it
to say it’s this prompt completion, like what do you say after this is said? And part of what
you’re doing both in data and in post training is you’re saying, okay, here’s the kinds of things
that count as good saying. So you have a whole bunch of humans who are running the system through
and saying, okay, to prompt one, like you say, the person says, how’s your day? And says, well,
my pet died today. And is it why respond A or respond B? Which one’s better response? And then
human beings respond to that. That’s part of how it gets aligned with our beings, part of how it
gets to kind of an EQ. And you’re partially telling your human beings who are training this
where you want to nudge and prompt the responses to so that they’re essentially doing the training
for this. And so if it said, for example, option A, oh, that’s too bad, you should really look up a
grief counselor. And option two was, oh, that must be really hard. Oh, my gosh, is there anything I
can do to help? I feel for you. Or, you know, probably wouldn’t say that just because it’s an AI,
but it’s like something else because you don’t want to make false anthem or worse thing. But
it’s like, look, I’m certain that connecting with friends or other kinds of things, how can I be of
most help? And shouldn’t you want to have a conversation about it? That would be the kind
of thing as all B is better than A, right? And so then by that, it learns how to have empathetic,
kind, compassionate conversations. Because you can do that even without necessarily being
compassionate or empathetic yourself, because as you noted, it’s not conscious. And by the way,
there’s bunch of human beings who are also not there empathetic, who learn to be more empathetic,
just by, you know, kind of, okay, this is the way you do this.
It’s really cool what you guys are doing at Inflection AI. So one of the things that I wanted
to talk to you about was trust when it comes to AI, because I feel like a lot of people are worried
about misinformation. There’s so many deep fakes out there. People are just worried about trust
when it comes to AI. So what are your thoughts around that? Look, trust is in, unfortunately,
short supply these days, generally, not just for the AI. Trust in institutions, trust in
democracies, voting systems, other people’s intent, you know, other kinds of things. So trust
is challenging. Now, the way that I think it’s going to be very important to build and maintain
trust with AI is for the people who are building it to be very clear about what their goals are,
what they’re doing, what they’re doing to try to build and maintain trust. Part of the reason why,
of course, my encouragement with super agency is for people to go try it because as they begin
to try it and learn what kinds of good things they can do, what kinds of things are going to be
empowered, that will be the kind of thing that builds the kind of positive trust in these kinds
of circumstances. And my advice to individuals encountering these things, like, you know, a
classic suspicion is say, well, big tech companies who are trying to make a lot of money are building
these things and they’re trying to make money from you. And I was like, well, by the way,
trying to make money from you is usually offering you a product and service you really like that
really is something that you come back for that you keep using. That’s good for you. That’s the
goodness of modern business. So you go, okay, so which things should I trust these AIs on or
which things should I not? And the answer is, well, if you generally should and you should
understand that company is trying to have you as a lifelong loyal customer that generally speaking,
most of them are smart about doing that. So they’re going to try to make it good.
If it’s something that’s particularly important to you cross-checking, it’s important. Like, you
know, when I go to GBD4 and get a prompt, then I go, you know, huh, that doesn’t really make full
sense to me. I’m going to go look at this a little bit more. Because it’s like, okay, if it said
something about like, yeah, your lab, your, you know, your black lab can eat that mushroom. It’s
like, nah, I really want to know. Yeah, double-check that. You know, so, and so you, you know, that
kind of thing. And by the way, over time, these will get better and better for how it operates.
And so I think that’s the kind of thing, but I think that’s the only by engaging and using,
having dialogue, having that dialogue match our experience over time, being accountable as creators
and companies for, you know, here are the things that we want in the use. And here are the things
that are still under development. And being clear about that so that people have a sense of, okay,
I understand it’s not perfect, but it could be really good for me. I feel like we’re in this
transition period where humans that have a specialized expertise right now are at such an
advantage. So for example, I have a podcast network. And I’m probably one of the most knowledgeable
people about monetizing podcasts. And I write a newsletter that I write personally with all
my industry knowledge. And sometimes I’ll just be like, well, what would chat GBT say? And then
it’s all wrong. And it’s just so basic, right? It’s so basic. It’s kind of wrong. And then I just
love it because I’m like, okay, people are getting my newsletter, which is this human experience that
they can’t get anymore. And it’s making me feel like I actually am more valuable. I think it will
transition where that might not be the case in like two years, but I feel like we’re in this
transition where specialized knowledge from humans is actually like really desirable.
Broadly, yes. And part of it’s obviously that specialized knowledge being evolved with how
you’re figuring out how to use like you made this comment earlier, how you use these new
tools really effectively. And so even with a depth of experience, the early involvement with open AI
and all that, I constantly am asking questions and trying to use a number of these tools myself
for real things, not just like create a sonnet for my cousin’s birthday or any of this kind of
stuff, but it’s also things like investment analysis or market trends or other kinds of things.
And frequently, just as you said, you know, like, ah, that’s not very good. Okay, fine.
And sometimes I go, I iterate on it. And sometimes I go, oh, no, no, I think that’s just not very
good right now. I’ll use it for other things, but using it constantly. So I have, I’ve enabled the
voice agents on my phones so that I can point my camera at things and talk to chat, GBT about
the thing I’m looking at, say mushrooms, right? And so, and you know, that kind of thing as a
way of understanding it. And I do think that human specialized knowledge creativity will even grow
with a premium, but it will grow at a premium in the use of the tools too. Like you can’t just buy,
like, I am genius. I don’t need AI. It’s like, no, I am genius because of the way that I use AI
to be an extra special genius. We were talking about deep bakes before. And I came across this
interview of you interviewing your own AI on your YouTube, you call it read AI, and it’s an
AI video avatar of you. Talk to us about how you felt in that interview. Did you learn anything
from it? Did you help you realize anything about AI in the future? It came about primarily because
I was like, look, here’s a technology that everyone’s so skeptical about. Our name for it is deep fakes.
It’s kind of like if your name was disaster, okay. So I was like, okay, but can I imagine that there
would possibly be good things that could work with this? And I was like, well, let’s explore because
we should. And let’s share the exploration. So we’ll have this kind of interview and conversation.
And as I said at the end of the interview, I thought I was going to hate this because I’m not
one of those people who talks to myself in a mirror. I was like, am I going to feel schizophrenic?
Am I going to feel self and grandizing? Am I going to feel like I can see all these different ways
that I could possibly hate this thing? And actually it was more interesting as kind of a palette and
exploration. Like if you said, well, I only want to talk to read AI, so absolutely not. But what I
want to talk to read AI sometimes and doing these things and have that as a way of having a dialogue
with myself and also showing what’s good at, because once I did that, one of the things I
realized is after I made that, I was off to go give a speech at the University of Perugia
in defense of an honorary doctorate. And I sort of wrote out the speech. And then I went, you know,
I could actually have read AI, give this speech. And I’m only really fluent in English
in all of these other languages, ranging from Hindi to Chinese to Arabic to all these things.
And to give the speech in those languages where people are much like, it was bizarre listening
to me, my voice, speaking Hindi or Chinese fluently. It’s like, what would I sound like
if I were speaking Chinese? Now, one of the things that my French friends told me is my
French sounded like Canadian French. And you know, I don’t know what the story of that is.
How is this? Is there more data audio samples of Canadian French or somehow it goes, well,
you’re North American, so we’re going to make you from Quebec rather than Putty? Who knows?
But it was humanizing. I thought I would really dislike it. And it was humanizing. And it started
making me realize just as I say to other people, hey, you should use the technology to get a sense
of it and to reinforce your own agency with the technology. It was like, that was me doing that
with that. And we continue to do new things with read AI. Probably one of the funniest ones
was the number of different press outlets that asked, we’d like to do an interview with read AI.
It was like, oh, that’s interesting. Cool. Yeah, it’s so cool. I feel like in terms of
content creation, I’ve got a lot of creator entrepreneurs that listen to the show. I feel
like AI is totally going to change the game. Even with me, I have my AI voice if I’m sick,
or if I miss a commercial, we can use my AI voice as an intermediate step. I’ll always rerecord it,
make sure that it’s me. But it’s really close to my voice. People really can’t tell. And we’re
working on my AI video. And to your point, people probably think I’m crazy creating my own deep bake.
But I want to be able to scale myself. And this is the future. And you just gave me such a great
idea in terms of the translations. People love to watch content all over the world, and not everybody
speaks English. Not only do I speak English, but also people most emotionally resonate with content
that’s in languages that they are native to. And so most people are native one language. Sometimes
they’re native a couple, but it’s within the languages they’re native to, which roughly means
languages they learn complete fluency before they were 12 for the vast majority of people.
It’s a human connection. If the person says, oh, I’m hearing this in Chinese, it’s warmer,
it’s smarter, it’s more engaging, et cetera, if Chinese is my native language.
I do feel like people who have a lot of content out there have a very unique advantage
going into the future because we can actually create these avatars with ourselves because
we have all this content. Absolutely. We’ll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors.
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One last question for you on the future of AI. So you’re obviously at the forefront of this.
You’ve thought a lot about it. You’ve written books on AI. So I just want you and you can take
your time with us because I think it’s very interesting. How do you imagine our world to be
five, 10, 20 years in the future with AI? What do you imagine the world to be like?
Well, one of the things that’s a great way to look foolish in the future is to make overly
specific predictions, partially because the usual principle I used to say in this is the future is
sooner and stranger than you think. And so people thought in the ’80s, we’re going to get AI, but
if we didn’t get AI, we got the internet, we got mobile phone. Well, maybe now we’re going to get
AI. I mean, we’re going to get what shape of AI is the interesting question. What I think is
the minimum guarantee is there’s going to be, as opposed to computer interfaces or phone interfaces,
we’re going to have agents. And agents are going to be the primary mode of navigation. What we
describe in super agency is an informational GPS. So in this entire informational digital world,
we’ll do that. And there will be more agents than there are people, especially when you consider
even though there might be just one agent, Pi, that’s kind of then instantiated with what remembers
out of its conversations and interactions with Hala, what it understands, remembers in its
conversation, interactions with Reed, et cetera, et cetera, this kind of this flow of agents. Now,
one of the things that I think people haven’t really fully tracked yet, but I think what we’re
interesting is how agents end up talking to each other. Because when we have that many agents,
part of how you and I are going to coordinate, like we say, hey, what should we talk about in the
podcast? Well, one of our preps will be your agent, we’ll talk to my agent. And they’ll kind of go,
well, you know, these topics will be really good. And, you know, hey, when you ask a question this
way, it’ll be great. And when you answer it this way, it’ll be great. And that kind of thing,
or this could be a really new interesting thing to try. And that will be part of the world that we
will be in. And I think that part of that will then make the premium on thinking creatively,
thinking differently. You know, as you mentioned, we’ll be much higher. My guess is, for example,
if you go back 30 years, and you told someone there would be these jobs called web designer,
data scientist, other things, they go, what are you talking about? You know, crazy person from
the future. And I think that’s another thing that we’re going to see even more of, which is like,
oh, didn’t realize that was going to be the job. Huh. And that’s cool. Those are some of the things,
but I try not to make overly specific predictions because usually there may all put it this way.
William Gibson, science fiction author, has a really good quote, which is,
“The future is already here. It’s unevenly distributed.” He’s been a great neural mancer,
it was the internet, everything else. Now, he was being asked in an interview,
“How did you see the future?” And he’s like, “Look, thank you for the compliment. But by the way,
if you read neural mancer, sure, I got AI right. I got the internet right. I missed the mobile phone.”
And so that’s the kind of thing that we’re always looking for is that surprise and delight moment.
And who knows with AI to your point, like, we have no idea what we’re going to see.
I’m excited to see it unfold. Okay, so I end my show with two questions. I ask all of my guests.
The first, and you can just answer however you’d like, doesn’t have to be about anything we talked
about today. What is one actionable thing our young and profitors can do today to become more
profitable tomorrow? So to become more profitable tomorrow, I guess I won’t say literally tomorrow,
right, since one day, 24 hour. I would say the important thing, you know, and this is kind of
part of how I think about the world, the important thing is to be thinking about what do you think
the environment your business is going to be in in one, three, and five years? And what do you
think that environment is going to be changing based on patterns of technology? What do you think
that’s going to be changing on patterns of competition? What do you think that’s going to
be changing in patterns of how you deliver your business, supply chain, et cetera? And so by looking
at that probable guess, how do you run the experiment today that informs you about which big choices
you need to make in that one, three, and five year timeframe? The experiment won’t necessarily make
you profitable, but the experiment may give you the thing that either gets you to more profit or
also helps you navigate the changes, which things are the new living creatures and which
things the dinosaurs in the future market. Great advice. And what is your secret to
profiting in life? And this can go beyond financial profiting in all aspects of life.
Fundamentally, part of why in the startup of you, I said life is a team sport,
because the startup of you is actually advice I give to entrepreneurs,
refactored to individuals being the entrepreneur of their own life. So it actually applies to
founders, applies to CEOs, applies to executives, applies to people working. But it’s the question
about life being a team sport. It’s you are amplified by your team. It’s more fun. You learn more,
and they help you in both upside and navigating downside. So the most fundamental thing,
life is a team sport. And now we’re going to have agents with our team.
Exactly. Amongst our team. Yes, with our team. We’ll also have agents, and everybody will have
agents. Reed, this has been such an awesome conversation. I really appreciate all your time,
all your wisdom. Where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do?
Well, LinkedIn. I post just about everything there. I also have readoffman.org and this year,
Publishing Super Agency. Amazing. I highly recommend everybody go get Super Agency,
also get Blitzscaling. I love that book as well. Reed, thank you so much for your time today.
Thank you for joining us on Young and Profiting Podcast.
A great pleasure. I look forward to our next conversation.
Okay, guys, that’s the second installment of my two-part conversation with the amazing Reed
Hoffman. He had so many great insights about how we should think about AI and where it’s
headed. And I’ve got so many takeaways from this conversation, but here’s my most important
takeaways from this chat. First, big picture. New technology changes industries. And that’s
what AI is going to do, and that’s what it’s going to do to your industry. So you need to get in
front of it and ask, what does this technology mean for my business, my product, or service,
and how will we operate as a company to get ahead of this? Technology also breeds fear and paranoia.
And the conversation that mean Reed had about the potential harms of AI is one that society has had
for all the other major innovations as well, from the printing press to the smartphone.
People are always scared of new technology. And we should be having these conversations,
but like Reed said, we should also recognize that most of our fears about these innovations
actually don’t come to pass. And we live in a better world because of them. And the world we
could live in, thanks to the advances in AI, could be truly transformational. As Reed put it,
if we do it the right way, it could be magical. Put simply, AI means amplification intelligence.
We’re going to be having AI agents on our phones and devices that become our personal
assistants, our tutors, our medical and financial advisors, and so much more. We’re going to be
having capabilities at our fingertips that we can’t even imagine today. We can’t even foresee
what the future is going to be like. And when you think about who’s going to thrive and flourish
in this world of super agents, it’s going to be the people who have managerial experience.
It’s going to be the entrepreneurs, young and profitors. We are the most equipped to handle
this AI revolution because we’re creative, industrious, innovative. We know how to manage,
delegate, motivate. We know how to let go of control. We know how to handle this young and
profitors. AI is going to multiply what you’re capable of. It is not going to replace you or
your business. We’re going to ride this wave, young and profitors. Thanks for listening to
this episode of Young and Profiting Podcast. If you listen, learned and profited from this
conversation with the legendary Reed Hoffman, please share this episode with somebody who’d
love it. And guys, I’ve been loving reading your reviews. So many of you are leaving reviews every
day on Apple, Spotify, Cast Box, Player of Fame, wherever you listen to your podcasts.
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Please tell your friends, tell your family, tell your colleagues, tell all the entrepreneurs in
your life that they’ve got to listen to Young and Profiting Podcasts. If you guys like to watch
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hit 50k subscribers, which is much smaller than my audio channels, but I’m going to invest super
heavily into video this year. And I just interviewed Mel Robbins in person. I interviewed Gary Vee in
person. I just had Sahil Bloom in person that didn’t come out yet. So I’m doing so many more
in person videos. And I absolutely love it. It’s making me a better interviewer. It is just so
much better for chemistry. And I’ve just been really digging it. So check out YouTube for all
the video content. If you guys want to follow me on social media, I always post like fun stories
about my life on Instagram @yapwithhala. Put a face behind the name. Why not? You can also find
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production team. If you guys don’t know, I have an award-winning social media and podcast agency.
It is my podcast agency that runs this podcast. I also have a podcast network that gets me
sponsorships and gets 30 other podcasts in the business space, sponsorships as well. We’re
crushing it on all sides. And I’m so thankful for my team. I literally have the best team in the
world. We’re so picky about who we hire. So we’ve got the A+ team at YAP who puts out A+ work
and that’s why we got A+ Money in the Bank. This is your host, Halataha, aka the podcast princess,
signing off.
[Music]
[BLANK_AUDIO]
Starting as an early AI enthusiast during his Stanford days, Reid Hoffman was eager to explore the potential of artificial intelligence, but the technology wasn’t ready, so he shifted his focus. Years later, inspired by conversations with top tech innovators, he recognized AI’s potential and seized the moment. He became a founding investor in OpenAI and later co-founded Inflection AI. In this episode, Reid introduces the concept of “superagency,” where AI enhances human capabilities rather than replaces them, addresses common fears about AI, and shares his vision for a future shaped by AI-powered agents.
In this episode, Hala and Reid will discuss:
(00:00) Introduction
(01:06) AI as the Next Big Wave
(03:30) AI, Jobs, and Concerns for the Future
(08:01) Superagency: Amplifying Human Capability with AI
(18:38) Training AI to Be a Better Human Companion
(22:20) Trust and Misinformation in the Age of AI
(25:01) Why Human Expertise Still Matters in AI
(27:19) Reid’s AI Twin
(30:12) Leveraging AI for Content Creation
(31:37) How AI Will Shape the Future
Reid Hoffman is an entrepreneur, investor, partner at Greylock, and co-founder of LinkedIn and Inflection AI. He was an executive at PayPal and a founding investor in several companies, including OpenAI. Reid actively supports various non-profits and has received numerous accolades, including an honorary CBE from the Queen of England and the Salute to Greatness Award from the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for his philanthropic efforts.
Connect with Reid:
Website: reidhoffman.org/
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/reidhoffman/
Twitter: x.com/reidhoffman
Instagram: instagram.com/reidhoffman/
YouTube: youtube.com/@reidhoffman
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Resources Mentioned:
Reid’s Book, Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future: https://amzn.to/4g7cfVG
Reid’s Book, Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI: amzn.to/4an8J8g
Reid’s AI Video, Reid Hoffman Meets His AI Twin: bit.ly/4jzlVeD
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Transcripts – youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new
