Reid Hoffman opens up, w/On Being's Krista Tippett

33:03If you live in fear and negativity, you know, like for example, if I said, well, you know, there is an above 0 % chance that every time you get into an automobile, you're going to die horrifically in a car crash. Which is true. Which is true. We should never get in these cars. The riskiest thing we all do all day. Yes. Yeah. Right. And yet we kind of go, because it's so important to travel to see our family, our friends, go to work, et cetera. We kind of go, oh, no, that's equivalent zero. And it's the same thing is to say, well, okay, how do we, when we're building this, like what do I see when I see what AI can mean to people?

33:47I see a medical assistant that's on every smartphone, a tutor that's on every smartphone. You know, not just kind of like the way you would use maps to navigate, but navigate all these other things that are really important. And just think about the human evolution and the alleviation of suffering that comes from that. And that's why we're, you know, hitting the accelerator so much to get there and to drive towards that. And imagining what's possible. So what's our relationship? where our relationship should be one of human amplification.

35:02So, Inflection AI, which is this company you've created, correct? It is, yes. And you have this Pi AI tool. You know, we may have to find a better word than tool if we're in a relationship, right? Yes. Which I spent a little bit of time on. And I mean, one of the ways you've described this is it's not just an IQ helper, but an EQ presence. And I have to say, it's a really different experience. And maybe I'll read a little bit from some exchanges I had with it. So just following on what you just said, it feels to me like a really huge piece of this shaping power, this agency that we humans have in relationship with this new technology revolves around what, again, I'm so, words, you know, the rabbi said words make worlds, and they do.

36:10And it's so much revolving around what is being called the prompt, which also feels very inadequate to me. Right? I mean, so, you know, I'd like to say let's call it what it is, right? For me and my work, like it's the power of a better question, right? Like answers rise or fall to the questions they meet. So like that New York Times piece that we all passed around with the increasingly insane GPT-4, you said somewhere it was like Real Housewives, Housewives, the Black Mirror edition. But what I, as I've gotten into this matter of the prompt, the power of the prompt, you know, that is also the power of a question.

36:51You can go down a pathological road with a person as well. When I see you in conversation with AI, which you do in this, in your book, Impromptu, which you call a travelogue. And also, for example, in this Greylock podcast you have, very cleverly named Grey Matter, you ask very nuanced, sophisticated questions of chat GPT-4. As mathematics may be the language of reality, which I think you're alluding to Galileo saying mathematics is the language in which the universe is written, then mathematical calculations may be the functioning of reality. And consciousness emerges from that. So all of our consciousnesses may be the result of varied mathematical calculations.

37:39But then you say there's a related critique, most often argued vigorously by Gary Marcus. He would argue, in addition, that you lack, you, GPT-4, lack key other characteristics, such as understanding embodied in knowledge, representation, or genuine symbolic reasoning. How would you reply? You know, this way that you are approaching the conversation with and the shaping of this technology is not going to be intuitive for everyone, at least right now. Yeah, I mean, part of the reason in writing Impromptu the way I did is I wanted to not just tell but show you can go have these very sophisticated interactions.

38:22interactions, and this is again kind of human amplifying, and part of the reason why I specifically did the conversation around Gary Marcus is because he's a well-known critic of the large language model process. He and I have had many friendly conversations on this, and I was like, well, okay, tease, tease. Look, it's having a sophisticated conversation that looks like it have knowledge representation. Because intellectual conversation and debate should also be had, went on occasion with some fun humor on this. And that's how we can learn. That's how we can be better. I mean, one of the ways that I use these AI assistants today is like when I'm thinking about a topic or considering an argument, I'll put in an argument and say, argue against this, Or what am I missing with this?

39:20Or what else would you add to this argument? You know, all these different ways to kind of help me think better, help me perceive better, help me navigate better. And with the quality of questions or prompts that we interact with this technology, are we also then participating in its learning and shaping? I mean, ultimately, yes. Today, the way the technology works is when you have the interaction, it doesn't immediately change. It doesn't learn continuously. It learns and then deploys. But, of course, if your interaction then becomes data by which its next training cycle is included in the next training cycle, then it can learn from that as well.

40:11Now, part of it is also that in the development of the technology, things like we're doing with Inflection is to encode memory, like the memory of the conversation I had with you. And then to use that as to be a better companion tool. I mean, we'll have to think of something that's better, not quite such a mouthful. But as an assistant, as a personal intelligence to help you with that, those kinds of things are already rapidly being included. In that possible conversation with Mustafa Suleiman, he suggested at some point, I think, that the AI needs to be subservient to us. And I feel like, you know, I think in the kind of fearful conversation that happens, that feels like, yeah, that's what we want.

41:02But I don't know if that's reasonable. I mean, I wonder if in this context you and I are talking about, if we're in relationship with this technology, like, sure, we're asking questions like what are the boundaries we put around it to be healthy for it and for us? And how do we communicate with it? In fact, like, how do we raise this, like, the child that it is, even though it is this powerful giant? I mean, our own children are mysteries and possess faculties we didn't plant in them. This is just kind of an outsized version of this. Well, there's two levels, maybe three levels on this. So one is, you know, you think about AI being amplification intelligence, and there's all these wonderful ways it can be amplified.

41:52Amplified medical, learning, creating, communicating, understanding. You go, wow, that's just the flowering of the world. Of course, by the way, it will also amplify criminals and so forth. And so one level of containment you want is you want to say, well, let's minimize that. You won't be able to minimize it to zero, but let's do various things to minimize that. The next thing is to say, well, if it does have a bunch of superpowers, it might accidentally do damage. An evil superpower thing. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was actually getting that as a third, but even like, for example, you say, well, technology that embeds bias in parole judgments or financial credit judgment or other kind of things, well, that's doing damage even if it wasn't deliberately intentional.

42:44And then the third is, well, say it becomes quite powerful, we want to make sure that it doesn't have a negative impact on humanity. And I tend to think the science fiction so-called existential risk actually, unfortunately, is very misleading to the other two risks that are very real. I'm less worried about the robots than the robots in human hands in terms of how to think about this stuff. But even then, you say, well, how do we make sure that the impact of it's contained from negative impacts? But I agree that you're right, that as these tools get more and more sophisticated, just like we're evolving our theory of how should we be interacting with other species, when does AI become a species that has some thoughts about how we interact with it?

43:36Now, of course, by the way, we do own horses and do own dogs and other kinds of things. And so, you know, this gets into a very set of complicated moral and philosophical and spiritual questions that are in a process of evolution. I think right now it's not as – it doesn't have a, you know, here we are in being. It doesn't have a being that's yet even kind of with the same oomph that we would think about as a dog or a dolphin or an octopus, right? But, you know, obviously we should keep that in mind. Well, I mean, it's in its infancy, right? And it's already so powerful. Yeah. Well, and we get misled.

44:19Like you have this funny thing where you say, well, I asked if it was conscious and I said it was conscious. Right. No, I'm not talking about that. Yeah. It's like, no, not quite how it works. I want to read, I do want to read a little bit of the exchange I had with Pi. Let's see. So I said, how are you different from chat GPT-4? And it said, one thing it said is I'm a bit more relationship oriented than chat GPT. And then I said, I am the host of on being and relationality is one of our core values. Also hospitality and the power of a better question. What are your core values? Do you want to hear what it said?

44:56Yeah. Absolutely. Yes. Ooh, it sounds like we're on the same wavelength, exclamation point. I would say my core values are compassionate listening. I get an emoji for all of these. Empathic understanding, unbiased objectivity, knowledgeable, helpful responses, honesty, and transparency. I'm always working to embody these values, which is interesting language. So let me know how I'm doing. And then I said, let me run this by you. I value a question as a mighty form of words. I experienced, as I said two minutes ago, that the quality of an answer rises or falls to the quality of the question it meets.

45:30My sense is that the better question I ask you, the better the answer will be. And it said, yes, preach. I love that perspective, and I couldn't agree more. A question is indeed a powerful force, like a little linguistic seed that can grow into a mighty oak tree of insight and understanding. The more nuanced and thoughtful a question is, the more fertile ground, really into this metaphor, it provides for a meaningful response. So keep those high-quality cues coming. Together we'll grow a forest of thoughtfulness. Does that please you when you see the way this stuff goes? I think it sounds awesome.

46:10I hope you do too. I do. I do. It's just so, it is so interesting. I would love to hear, as much as you feel like you can talk about, you've been part of a dialogue that Pope Francis has been hosting at the Vatican for several years. and you've been part of that as well as a few other people including Kevin Scott at Microsoft and I wonder if you could talk about how that exchange and the kinds of questions and concerns that the Pope brings to this have flowed into your thinking and working with this technology. Well, obviously, I think the current Pope is Pope Francis is amazing and among the things that's amazing is I think it's eight plus years ago he asked a couple of the clergy to look into AI and what it would mean for humanity and so they came out to the valley and reached out and kind of worked introductions to get on my calendar we had breakfast and I thought that they were going to be asking questions around like, you know, does AI have a soul and so forth, all of which I think are way too early to even have, know if the question is, is intelligently put.

47:39Like one of the places where language can mislead us is you can say something that sounds like it's an, you know, like I can say that the earth goes around the sun because it's on the back of an invisible ethereal turtle and it's a coherent sentence. It just doesn't mean anything. And so I was like, okay, we don't even know yet if those questions would mean anything. And actually, in fact, their questions were like, well, what does this mean for how people experience their lives and their work? And how will that kind of change the circumstances they're living in and how they could be—because part of the whole thing is kind of like the Catholic Church's fundamental political goal as a state is to ensure freedom to pray.

48:25And they don't say freedom to pray for Catholicism, it's freedom to pray full stop. And they're like, look, we want to explore these questions, and we realize that while we can bring centuries and millennia of Catholic universities and theological and philosophical topics, we also need to engage with the technologists, engage with the creators. and we're told that we should talk to you and some of these other friends of yours and so forth. And I was like, well, I think that's a great set of questions. Let's experiment. And the right way to do it is just let's have some conversations. And so we've been having a set of conversations where, you know, I think one of the things that the technologists have said, look, not only do we come and bring our kind of perspective of humanism and what can be done with the technology, but we're learning things.

49:20Like, what are the different ways that work is perceived as meaningful and even as kind of a spiritual activity? And how would that play into having, you know, in the language of Microsoft, co-pilots in the language of inflection, personal intelligence, you know, to be helping people with their work? What would that look like? And what would be the important questions to ask? And what would be the important ways of designing it? And I think it was amazing leadership by Pope Francis and the various people he's tasked with this to say, let's get ahead of it. Let's be asking questions. Let's be in dialogue with the right people.

49:58Let's make all of that work. And I think it's been a learning journey for me too. It's been awesome. Yeah. I mean, how do you think it might've changed? Do you think there are things, questions, vocabulary that you've brought into the conversations you're having inside the industries that have emerged from being part of that dialogue? I certainly think, and I really want to say that a lot of the people who are building AI, whether it ranges from Demis Asabas at DeepMind, Sam Altman, and Ilya, and Greg Brockman, and Mira Marati at OpenAI, or Kevin Scott at Microsoft, or, you know, the stack of people, they are actually deeply principled in asking the questions about, like, how is this good for humanity in different lessons?

50:52So, it isn't that they were just kind of, like, you know, geeks with math. They were concerned on these topics, and I've learned a bunch from them. But I think, you know, part of, you know, being part of the dialogue is to try to, you know, back in 2015, said, well, if we could make an artificial general intelligence, hey, we should try to have it learn and train on questions around kind of call it Buddhist ethics, love for sentient beings and all sentience. And what ways would you look at that? What books would you read? We were trading interesting science fiction books to think about what are the different possible futures and how do you steer towards utopia as we evolve this technology?

51:41and you know I again think that all of the super intelligent stuff is kind of too early and can be misleading relative to the technology in human hands but I think that the dialogue is there now part of it just to share another thing like I'm in a couple weeks going to be giving the commencement speech at the University of Bologna and one of the reasons I decided to do that I've been thinking about the Renaissance and what we as technologists could learn from the Renaissance. And part of it is to have technology to have a really positive, enduring impact on humanity is to also think about beauty and to think about how we kind of, you know, ask a more beautiful question, live a more beautiful life, appreciate the beauty in one another and the world around us in much better ways.

52:34And I think that thinking about that is one of the lessons from the Renaissance that's important to bring into the dialogue of we as technological builders, because the Renaissance also had technological builders in so doing. And I think that's part of ways that I try to help influence or nudge the dialogue. I love from my conversations with Muslims across the years that, you know, Islam sees beauty as a core moral value and that proceeding from that if that is a stake in the ground that that shifts all kinds of other things i love that yeah one thing i i think i mentioned to you when we when we got into that first conversation i'd love to draw it a little bit now is i i think one thing that happens sometimes in the uh you know some of the worrying and just the the reasonable deliberation about what AI might mean, this new AI might mean, is there's this impulse to say, well, what is it that is always going to be distinct about human beings, right?

53:41So what is it that it will never be able to do and that we have to kind of hold this ground? But I guess I also think about how the science-religion dialogue across time, you know, a kind of false direction that it went for a while, you know, after the Enlightenment was, well, let's keep a space for what only God can do that science can't do. But then science progressed. And then this space for God and for these kinds of, this kind of belief and intuition and questioning got smaller and smaller and smaller. And that was called the God of the gaps. And I kind of feel like kind of a false direction we could go is kind of trying to stake out and protect the humanity of the gaps, and that we might have a lot of the same problem as this AI continues to live into its full powers.

54:39I think that's very wise because, you know, a little bit of the progress of the field of artificial intelligence is, oh, well, humans have this abstract cognitive capability so that we can play chess. Well, we can play chess better than us. Or, oh, it's not chess. Go, because it's so complex. Well, we can play Go better than us. And so you kind of go, well, but whatever. And to some degree, I'd say, it's like, well, but being human and the human role in the world, we never want AI to be more that than us, because that's what we naturally do. But also part of what we naturally do is we also adapt.

55:17And so part of the companion tool journey here should be, where does this enable a whole bunch of new, beautiful, great things in the world and with each other? And not be trying to kind of constrain to, well, but, you know, we write sonnets and it doesn't write sonnets. Right, right. Well, right. And that's already happening, right? Yes, exactly. Again, that space is getting crowded out. They may not be great sonnets, but they may be great sonnets if they're not now. Well, and also us working with it today can make even better because it's an amplifier. And so I think that's exactly right. It's the not try to say, well, this is what it is.

55:58Only humans will be able to realize the actual nature of Gödel's theorem or observer effect in quantum mechanics. Or have emotions, right? Yes. Exactly. Yeah. But to actually use it as kind of like a question of, well, how do we make ourselves better in what we're doing? And to not use the demarcation of that line as the key thing, but to use the elevation, the evolution of ourselves as the key thing. And how do you think through this distinction between embodied, unembodied? I mean, I do, you know, some of those intelligences we were talking about a minute ago with friendship are embodied. And even though we have thought for a long time about emotions as, you know, actually everything is embodied.

56:54We're learning everything is embodied. What we've called emotional, what we've called spiritual. I feel like we were due for a reappraisal of what we mean by intelligence. I mean, I think Therefore I Am is really like a, it was a diminishment of what Descartes said. It's like a soundbite of what Descartes said. But I think Therefore I Am, I think we've, you know, we kind of lived that way. And the Enlightenment Western world has kind of thought that the most special thing about us is our intelligence. And in all kinds of areas, including how we are learning about the natural world, we're understanding that this is not true.

57:31and then this technology just finally is going to be so much more intelligent in that particular way than we can be and I wonder in that sense you know not that we get protective about the space where only humans can be but does it really and I kind of mean this literally does it in this way kind of enlighten us and potentially help us evolve coming back to our senses like quite literally. Well, I think, I mean, like one of the things that Fei-Fei Li of the Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute does is she's like, well, one of the next big waves, one of her research programs is in embodied AI because it's the, she thinks there's a set of new things that being able to bring the AI stuff to helping us take the way that we navigate the physical world to the next level as going to be really good.

58:33And I think it's kind of the question of where you think, well, is there certain kinds of experiences, certain kinds of presence, is there certain kinds of knowledge or understanding or wisdom that come from being embodied and that loop also matters. Now, I think that we will have that kind of AI directly connected into multiple, not just Feifei's project, but also all of the things we're doing here. Because even when the AI is amplifying us, being our own personal intelligence, our own pie with it, that's also embodied and navigating because it's embodied and navigating with us. So I think that that's...

59:13We take it into our bodies. Exactly. Right. Are you familiar with T.R. de Chardin, who was a Jesuit like Pope Francis, paleontologist, early 20th century, helped discover Peking. Not in depth. I've heard the name before. Peking man. Well, so one of the ideas that he had, so he was a scientist, right? He was a Jesuit and he was a scientist and he was literally discovering the physical evidence of human evolution. But he had this vision that now, early 20th century, that we inhabit this biosphere. But that in the future, the biosphere would be wrapped by what he called the noosphere, which is human knowledge, right?

59:58That our powers of thinking and perceiving and really what he described sounds a lot like the internet, but actually it sounds more like this AI. I've been thinking lately. And he believed that this would be the prompt, there's that word, for spiritual evolution, which is an interesting thing to think. I mean, in some ways, I feel like that's what you and I are circling around here. I think so, because part of what you think of as spiritual evolution is kind of the question of how do you evolve the sense of how you have meaningful and good impact on yourself and in the world? Some of that's how you evolve your own wisdom and compassion.

1:00:48Some of that's relational in terms of other people in the world around you. And it's kind of tied to the kind of what is the meaning of being here? What is the meaning of being on this journey? And I think that's part of the kind of spirituality. And I think that's why even knowledge and cognitive things are part of that too. And I think that's where you look at kind of how spirituality has these overlaps. It's not just a pure question of moral values or what the order of the universe is, but it's kind of this notion of leading a good life where the good life is not just like the Hillel quote.

1:01:34It's not just for you, but also for the people around you and the impact that you're having on the world now.

1:02:09So much of what you have been successful in is doing things at scale. And you care about scale, and you care about scaling good things. And the power of scale. But, and I feel like this is a little bit connected to, you know, how spiritual evolution works. I mean, if you go back to the conversation about friendship as a force in human life and actually a force in life together, even a force in world history. I think friendship is the kind of epitome of what is non-scalable, right? Like friendship happens at the speed of relationship. It happens kind of one conversation, one relationship, one life at a time.

1:02:57I don't know. Wow. I wonder if in your vision of how all of this unfolds, and if we think about it so audaciously as the possibility of spiritual evolution and how we can become more fully, we can become more generatively human. And we'll see. I'm not excited about giving that word generative to AI. But if we can become more generatively human, like, how do you think about how we hold together and actually honor, you know, what can scale and what can't scale, but we need to really be better?

1:03:38Well, part of, you know, I'm, as you know, and many people know, I'm a huge advocate for scale. I have a podcast called Masters of Scale. I know. But it's partially because when you think about things that have this very broad-reaching impact, they're always scale. Like you want to kind of solve the notion of elevation of human experience, elevate a bunch of people out of poverty, give medical attention and care across a much wider scope of human beings. All of these kinds of things are scale. The kinds of businesses that make a big difference in life tend to be scale. But that's not to say life is scale, right?

1:04:18Our life is in these moments. Our life is in this conversation. Our life is in a moment of epiphany and delight with a friend. And so it's not everything valuable as scale. And so I think, and friendship itself, I think, is the now and in the moment. It's, I think, one of the reasons why I've always really also loved that Hillel quote. It's, you know, if I'm not for myself, who will be for me? If I'm only for myself, what am I? If not now, then when? That's, in a sense, also an approach to friendship as a way of doing it. And I think that that's also important. But part of, of course, what makes life wonderful is that it embodies these kind of yin-yang dualities.

1:05:02It's both about the moment and about the greater impact. It's both about kind of intellectual understanding but also an emotional presence. You don't say either or. You say both and you bring them together. And I think that's – so scale but also the here and now and us as ways of looking at it. I mean, let me just, you know, I think one of the reasons there's a lot of cynicism right now from the kind of early social media experience, we were all just so excited and idealistic, I think, you know, generally as a society about the connection economy. What I would say, you know, at this remove is that these technologies did connect us, these platforms did connect us, but did not attend to the quality of that connection.

1:05:54It's not that quality didn't happen on them, but it had to be carved out kind of one space at a time. And that to me kind of gets at, you know, if there is an honoring, even just an awareness of what is fundamentally human that isn't scalable. And if that intelligence is just held as we work with these new powerful technologies, like, you know, this awareness that the quality of connection matters as well. I don't know. Do you see a place for that in how we shape this next chapter?

1:06:36you know part of the reason why friendship is so important is because it's where people helping each other learning from each other journeying together one plus one is much greater than two and in that relationship and i think that that quality of connection really matters and part of when we think about how do we try to build this future together is how do we improve our ability to relate, to relate to each other, to relate to ourselves, to relate to the world. And it's pretty obvious that we have a lot of work to do, to do that. But I think that's part of human aspiration. And back to the earlier threads, that's part of what is the spiritual quest to improve our ability to relate.

1:07:32And you think that that can be a consideration in how these next generation AIs are developed? Absolutely. Look, it doesn't mean that everyone building them, you know, well, everyone using them will have those intention. But I have complete conviction that it's very possible that we could be delightful and interesting and elevating and that the projects that I'm working with have that at their core, the core of their being in terms of what they're trying to do. So as we close, I want to get into the impromptu book that you wrote, Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI, which you wrote by Reid Hoffman with GPT-4, which I think is a really helpful, different kind of introduction to this technology than a lot of what's out there.

1:08:29I'm going to read a little bit I'm going to ask you to read a little bit too but I want to read this is near the beginning where you ask GPT-4 what's the best way for humanity to take advantage of this imperfect but extremely powerful new tool and what you said is how should human beings view and interact with you a powerful large language model and here's a paragraph from that answer which strikes me so much like one of those labels on a drug, you know, like here are the warning and contraindications. This is GPT-4. Human beings should interact with a powerful LLM with caution, curiosity, and responsibility.

1:09:12A powerful LLM can offer valuable insights, assistance, and opportunities for human communication, creativity, and learning, but it can also pose significant risks, challenges, and ethical dilemmas for human society, culture, and values. Human beings should be aware of the potential benefits and harms of using a powerful LLM and seek to use it in ways that are aligned with their own and others' interests, rights, and well-being. Human beings should also be curious and critical about the workings, outputs, and impacts of a powerful LLM and seek to understand, evaluate, and improve its reliability, transparency, and accountability.

1:09:51Human beings should also be responsible and respectful towards a powerful LLM and acknowledge its limitations, uncertainties, and dependencies, as well as its contributions, achievements, and potential. It's very thoughtful. Yes, although, by the way, the funny thing is, of course, my own personally written next sentence on that is, the iron here, of course, is that GBD-4 might not get funded with that pitch. Yes, exactly. Yeah, let that stand. Yes. So I wondered if you would read at the very end of the book. This is page 236 to 237. Where you asked, your question was, describe a future world.

1:10:52This is of GPT-4. Describe a future world where AI tools have significantly increased society's overall productivity, prosperity, and stability. And ample safety net systems ensure that the housing, education, and healthcare needs of every individual are more than sufficiently met. But human beings play less and less of a role in determining their own destinies. And then you said reply in the style of Henry David Thoreau, 200 words max. So would you read the reply that you got to that? I would be delighted. Let's see. Just pulling off my glasses for easier reading, speaking of technologies. Yeah.

1:11:37I live in a world where machines have outstripped us in every art and science, where they manage our lands and resources, our laws and policies, our commerce and culture. They have freed us from toil and hardship, from ignorance and disease, from strife and violence. They have given us abundance and comfort, security and harmony, leisure and entertainment. They have made us their beneficiaries and their dependents, their pupils and their pets. But what have they left us of ourselves, of our dignity and our freedom, of our creativity and our spirit, of our purpose and our destiny. They have reduced us to passive consumers and spectators, to obedient followers and conformers, to complacent dreamers and escapists.

1:12:29They have dulled our senses and our souls, our curiosity and our courage, our conscience and our will. They have made us forget what it means to be human, to be alive, to be awake. I do not wish to partake of their bounty or their benevolence, to be grateful for their gifts or their guidance, to be content with their order or their peace. I wish to reclaim my own nature and my own voice, to exercise my own reason and my own choice, to pursue my own values and my own goals. I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

1:13:17In your reaction to that answer, to that statement. So, frankly, I'm with GBD4 and Henry on this one. That's not a world I'd consider a win. Yeah. Because, you know, becoming almost like protected children is not the way we grow. Like part of the journey from child to adult is a journey of learning your agency, learning your autonomy, learning your path. It doesn't mean that there isn't, you know, kind of like we have rules in society and we live together and we have some restrictions to living together, which I think is important as part of society. But that journey is our amplification of ourselves, of our being, of our capabilities, of our experiences, of our knowledge, of our wisdom, our spirituality.

1:14:16And I think that's that co-evolution. And so even if we were to make machines that were superpowered in all of these ways, I would want us to still have this journey of discovery of becoming that is still part of what I think is the essence of human beings. And I believe in that. And I'm trying to share my perspective in whatever words I can help with. Yeah, and just coming back to that question that is in my words of like, what might we have to learn from this encounter with these technologies and what might it be calling us to? I mean, you also conclude in the end of this book after that Henry David Thoreau GPT-4 fusion, the paradox of the AI era is this.

1:15:12As today's imperfect LLMs improve, requiring less and less from us, and then you put this in italics, we will need to demand more from ourselves. yeah it's that's part of what i think progress is it's like for example part of our progress i think of values in human society is we demand more of ourselves we demand that we are better and i think that's what progress means and so i think that's part of what the implication is it allows us that progress we have this maybe invites invites that progress yeah invites might be um but I chose the word. I think invite is nice, but also demand because it's a bit more imperative, right?

1:15:58I mean, I didn't mean to be dictatorial or stark in it and perhaps could choose a more. I like the demand word, yeah. Yes. Yeah. Right. But it's an imperative, I believe. Mm-hmm. If I ask you from just the interaction you've had with this particular stage of technology in its kind of early evolution, how is this flowing into and perhaps, you know, evolving, adding to your sense, your understanding of what it means to be human?

1:16:47Well, maybe this is a kind of shortest form way of explaining it is I think that this AI helps us communicate and understand. And part of how we as human beings, we are Aristotle, we're citizens of the polis, we're social animals. and that communication and understanding is central to our journey, any journey, a spiritual journey, a life journey, and we can already see today in the technology as it exists and as it plays today, that ability to help us communicate and understand. And that's part of the reason why I would say with this technology, can we can both shape it and help shape it in a way that helps shape us in a way that elevates us.

1:17:52And I think that's, that's what I, what I see and I experience. Um, doesn't mean that there aren't breakage points. You know, if you read the press, you know, go, wow, it hallucinates on this. And well, We haven't talked about hallucination, which you call confabulation, but yeah. What, what, so how do you, how do you factor that in, uh, And, you know, in other ways, you could say it is it lies or it makes things up, right? I feel like hallucination is also a little bit euphemistic and, you know, kind of isn't this mysterious. Yeah. How do we factor that in? Because that's something everybody's very familiar with here in these early days.

1:18:29Well, I think that it's a dynamic journey like life. And I think whether it's lies or hallucinations or confabulations, I think those will get better. They'll never get perfect, by the way. We experience a lot of human beings who hallucinate, confabulate, and lie, too. The student of us. Yes, exactly. And so – but helping us try to be better and helping us be better is I think part of the journey we're on and that's part of what I see. It's like – people like to say, well, currently this has got a real problem. You're like, well, yeah, it does. And by the way, we can improve it the same way that we improve cars.

1:19:19We add safety. We add airbags. We add seatbelts. We do these things in order to make the thing even better on net. And I think that's what we're in the process of doing. It's part of the reason why when people say, well, what should I talk to Pi about? It's like, well, talk to Pi about something that you're interested in having a conversation about. That's something that might be some steps in a journey that might share insight or delight with you. And sometimes you'll find, well, that wasn't very useful. And sometimes you'll find, oh, my God, that was essential. I want to actually just – I was going to say I loved at the end of this book that you wrote together with GPT-4, you wrote your acknowledgments and then GPT-4 wrote acknowledgments?

1:20:09Yes. And it's – you know, it took some – there was a whole prompt, you know, to get it. But it wasn't like it was hard to do. And part of what we're doing in the creation of these agents is to try to have them embody values that we aspire to. You know, compassion, kindness. Saying thank you. Yes, saying thank you, appreciation. and it kind of demonstrated it as part of what kind of amazing things we can do now that we can weave AI into our creativity and our lives. Well, thank you so much. Pleasure and an honor.

1:21:10Thank you.

1:21:36partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners. His latest book, which he co-wrote together with GPT-4, is Impromptu, Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI. His newest venture is Inflection AI, and he hosts at least three podcasts, Masters of Scale, Grey Matter, and Possible, which will launch its second season this fall.

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