BIG INTV: Reid Hoffman Wants Silicon Valley to ‘Stand Up’

25:38And you're like, shit, well, that's me. Like, how could you do that? That is Sarah. Yes, right. And you're like, okay, but here is why it's genius. It's like, sure, it'll create something. It'll sound like you and da-da-da-da. But now as a tool for you, and this is a tool that will amplify you much more than it will even amplify upcoming artists, and upcoming artists can do this in different ways, is you can go, okay, make me 10 different versions of how I would do this. and your genius isn't just the fact that you've got this particular playing style or else but your genius is also kind of how you judgment and curate and you go oh my god in this second rendition second seconds 10 to 17 were genius i'm going to build on that i'm going to take that i'm going to use it now you can generate sarah music in ways that like with breadth and boundary of imagination and else that now you can do an accelerated basis and and and that's part of what this enables.

26:35And that's part of the reason why it will ultimately be amazing because, sure, a bunch of slop will get created. Well, I mean, that's sort of the thing is that everyone can create Sarah's music, right? Yes. Yep. But also, Sarah can now create much better Sarah music. And Sarah can now use that as the exemplar. And by the way, just like the recent Disney deal with Sora, the better way to build a franchise is to have a whole bunch of people kind of going, I'm going to create, you know, something with stormtroopers, you know, et cetera, et cetera, as ways of doing it. And that's actually, in fact, part of what the new world is.

27:11Well, let me ask you this. Did Sarah come around? Sarah came up to me at the end of the conference and went, oh, my God, you're right. That's really exciting. And as I realized is that that can empower me in what I'm doing. And it isn't just like because, you know, the frame that Sarah had had pseudonym, by the way, but that Sarah had had was, oh, this is just stealing from me because that's the general media discourse. And it's like, oh, wait, I actually have an advantage of having all this material because then I can actually use that as a ways of even further amplifying and doing the things I'm doing.

27:44And people will still care about the ones that are for me, because I do think that one part of art, like, which will not go away is we care about it as a human connection. Of course. Yeah. There will be art that also like, Like, hey, look, will a bunch of kind of like music in the elevator become AI generated? The answer is absolutely yes. Kind of sounds like it's AI generated already. Right. But and the whole bunch of things, including artists really using and doing it for cool things. But also what people will care about is it's a human connection and that will still remain for a broad swath of art.

28:17And so that doesn't go away.

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31:06Think of it as your guide for all things AI with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in.

31:28How have you wrestled with AI's acceleration versus its risks? I know that you have advocated for AI development to continue, not to be slowed down in sort of unduly ways. But how do you think about sort of the risk versus reward there? So, one is, if you kind of, and you know this from having read Super Agency, if you said, hey, we're not going to put a car on the road until we answer every risk, you'll never get a car on the road. Sure. You have to put the car on the road. You have to drive it. You have to learn it. And, by the way, you'll have some footfalls for that. You'll have, you know, you invent a car, you invent the car accident, right?

32:05Oh, yeah. Car accident will happen. But what you do is you say, what are the things you prevent in advance, which are the limited subset of stuff that's really pretty catastrophic? Like, no, you can't have a car without a brake. Right? Like, must put brakes in. But, like, very, like, specific and kind of limited and not try to imagine everything and shape it to only, like, zero negative outcomes. Because then, as you learn, you do iterative deployment, you then go, oh, this is the thing we should fix, given we've learned. So, like, and by the way, some of it happens in the industry, like in the car, you add airbags.

32:39But some of it also happens through like regulatory society goes, I know there's no consumer demand for seatbelts, but we know what the hospital outcomes are. We're going to mandate seatbelts. Well, sure. But how is the mandating seatbelts part going in the in the AI regulation conversation? Well, I'm not sure where. Look, I think we're just beginning to get to like I think one of the places that's most interesting in it, which is. Do you have your chatbots talking to children? Yes, no. If you have your chat box talking to children, are you responsible in the way that one should be responsible to children?

33:18Like, for example, questions around self-harm or other kinds of things. And what does that look like? Right. And, you know, I think Anthropic is doing a good job of showing the way of saying, hey, look, we need to be really proactive about cybersecurity because this could be used for all kinds of cybercrime. And we're going to be really proactive and everyone should be doing the kind of stuff we're doing. Right. Maybe that will end up also being a seatbelt moment if other people don't follow it. You know, is it an airbags or a seatbelt moment? We'll see. And part of the reason, by the way, I'm very positive on forward motion is our tool set to fix the ills gets richer with the forward motion.

33:56Right. Like I was on the board of OpenAI for a while. also looking at GBD3, GBD4, GBD5 in sequence, the tool set for them being aligned to human values, to human well-being, got richer as the models got better. So that's the reason I'm broadly very positive. That doesn't mean that I don't worry about bioterrorism as an emergency thing, that I don't, like, I fundamentally agreed with the Biden executive order on AI, which is, hey, have some transparency and reporting and a red team plan and all the rest of the stuff. And I think all that stuff is still going to be there despite the, you know, the current administration's like, let's revoke everything that Biden possibly touched as totally bad and evil, which is, you know, you know, think about it as kind of like like it's a child's response.

34:42Like you obviously should be like that part was good. That part was bad. Whatever. Like as opposed to revoke it all is just clearly, you know, incorrect. Well, I am curious about this because, I mean, you are a Democrat. You are loud and proud. You have been very politically outspoken in recent years. Are you worried that your political point of view right now is denying you a seat at the table when it comes to AI and AI regulation? I mean, literally a seat at the table when we look at photos from some of these dinners. Do you worry about that? And what are you doing to make sure that your voice is a prominent one as this sort of regulatory framework either does or does not take shape under this administration?

35:29Well, my view about my voice at the table is I only – like I basically come to the table when asked and try to be helpful whether – and like for example, if I was asked by the current administration to try to help with what they're doing, I would do that. It sounds like you have not been asked. I have not been. Fair. And then they claim that the previous administration was the same and it's very politically biased. I at least know that the previous administration would call people who disagreed with them and ask their point of view minimally. you know what I just try to do is do things like this you know podcasts media writing books you know advising people when they ask for advice I think part of what you try to do to contribute to society is you try to contribute your best possible work and perspectives and try to gather people around those to maximize the chance that it has impact and then you know that's the best you can do and I am curious you know you are a billionaire in in politics and you frame that engagement as a way to strengthen democracy.

36:29I'm curious about when that value became personal for you, when it sort of felt like a personal imperative as opposed to, you know, an intellectual idea of sort of the importance of upholding democracy. When did that become something of real personal importance? Well, fundamentally, so I've always been of the view, one of my criticisms about kind of underlying libertarianism in American culture is that I believe, call it Spider-Man ethics or Voltaire ethics, with power comes responsibility. If you make a bunch of money or you inherit a bunch of money, that's an investment from society. It's not like, I alone have brought you this.

37:15It's like, no one did that. It's the whole society and so forth. By the way, I'm a believer in the capitalism. system. I'm a believer in the fact that we set out goals for people to contribute to society and then get rewarded from that. And, you know, all systems are imperfect, and so it doesn't mean it's perfect, but, you know, as a broad-based system, it's good. Now, that being said, I think with power, when you get power, one form of power is money, another form of power is media, another form of power, like, you know, government, comes responsibility. And the responsibility is not just to yourself, but to society and to humanity.

37:48And so that I've always had. And so from the very beginning, like I started serving on nonprofit boards very early in my career. Like if any, call it well-ordered democracy, government official asked me for something, I would try to help in terms of advice and not advice for my giving for a business, but whatever. And then, you know, part of what I think we're seeing is the general decay of American governments, American society through the current administration. At the beginning of this year, I said, hey, I anticipate I'll get political persecution, you know, calls for the DOJ to investigate me from, you know, social media, truth social, et cetera, as ways of doing this or that.

38:31But there's also many different things. It's like, you know, if you said, hey, we're living in a society where mass people are pulling people off the streets and putting them in vans and putting them in something that can be characterized as a camp, right? Which we've had, you know, like even in our, you know, great country, we've had bad problems with in the past, let alone other places. So you're living in that society. Those are degradations of society. Yeah. Right. And so that's the reason why with Trump won's election is when I really started leaning in because, you know, like there were not a lot of traditional Republicans that I view as friends that I disagree with about some things.

39:12They may think that we should teach religion in school and I think we shouldn't, but they care about the rule of law. They care about democracy. They care about resolving this through discourse. And so I think this is the kind of thing that, as opposed to just supporting great leaders as I found them, Democrats or Republicans, I'm now going to try to work on society because I think that's one of the places that responsibility has for those who have power. Now, the narrative around Silicon Valley in the last year has not been politically generous, at least in the media. And I include Wired in that assessment.

39:47I mean, obviously, Stephen Levy wrote what I thought was a tremendous cover story for us several months ago about this. I agree. I agree. I'm glad. Thank you. A lot of your peers have been very quiet about this, if not downright cozy with the administration. How do you understand this change in Silicon Valley? How does it read and look to you?

40:13You know, obviously, it's always a challenge when you say all Silicon Valley or, you know. Sure, of course. The media has a way to simplify narratives. Yeah, yeah. Certainly. But let me kind of break it down into some groups. So first, the broad collective belief in Silicon Valley is that a super important way to make change in the world is building technology companies. It builds the next products and services at scale. And it's one of the levers that change things. And so, you know, arguments for that is like what I'm doing with Manus AI in terms of trying to cure cancer and so forth. And that's a religion that I think everyone or the vast majority of people actually believe in in a strong, strong way, which is the reason why you get like HBO mocking it.

40:55Because even though the religion is there, it's like, oh, I'm inventing this other weird little trinket to change humanity. And you're like, okay. But within that, there's different groups. There's one group that's totally motivated by that primarily for making money. And by the way, making money in terms of building businesses and creating jobs and product and service, totally fine thing. But that's it. So they don't care. There's people who have kind of a strong, call it not just economic, but like belief in the technology pattern of cryptocurrency where the Biden administration was essentially declaring war on cryptocurrency and was unbanking cryptocurrency companies.

41:38and kind of not the right kind of regulatory, like just applying regulatory pressure versus having a regulatory regime and following it and so forth. And so they, you know, also were like, okay, pro-MAGA. There's a group of people who believe that the Democrats are overly captured by, you know, kind of Palestinian interests and would be anti the state of Israel and, you know, doing that. So they're in the kind of pro-MAGA group. And then, you know, there's also pure opportunists for power, like, oh, it's our turn to eat, you know, kind of is the group. So and all of those went very noisy for this.

42:17Now, part of what I think with the critique of the current administration is I think there's a bunch of people in Silicon Valley who disagree with them, but they're like, well, look, if I speak up or do things, then I'm like challenging my company. I'm going to get hostile retaliation. I'll get regulatory thing that's discriminatory, like just attacking me as a political enemy versus the thing I'm doing, and I'm trying to do this thing that's good for humanity, and so forth. And part of the reason why I, because by the way, I, of course, get messages from people saying, you should be quiet, you should keep your head down, et cetera.

42:50And I'm like, look, precisely one of the things to think about is when you feel fear is the opportunity for courage. And the fact that you feel fear about speaking what you think is truth in your mind about who we should be as Silicon Valley or as Americans or as perspective, and you fear retaliation, that's precisely the degradation of the American society that are the values that we hold so dear. And that's precisely the opportunity for courage. And so part of what I'm, like, if you say what I'm hopeful for in 26 is I'm hopeful for more people kind of speaking up. That doesn't have to be speaking Reed's truth about this, but the speaking truth to power is the point of freedom of speech, is the point of the kind of American society.

43:41And I think that like there's a bunch of different factions in the Valley that have been keeping their head down out of this kind of fear retaliation under a rationalization of, hey, my contribution is to build this new company and I'll just kind of sidestep it. And it's like, look, I actually think with power comes responsibility to speak up about what's good for people. And like, you know, the way that ICE is operating is terrible for people. Tariffs are terrible for people. Like anti-vaccination is terrible for children's health. Just speak up about the things that you think are true and to do that and not let fear and intimidation and hostility, the weaponization of the artifacts of state quiet you.

44:25Well, you talked a minute ago about fear. And I mean, I couldn't agree more. It's something that we talk about as a newsroom at Wired all the time and especially in the last year. Are you fearful? I mean, you are a prominent person. You are a very wealthy person. You work in this industry. Do you worry about this? I mean, I think in particular, I'm thinking back to, you know, Trump ordered an investigation into you and other figures. Twice. Well, I'm referring to sort of the Epstein situation. I don't know. It was the one before, which is this fictional organization of Antifa, which I only know from right wing media invention.

45:05I am also unfamiliar with the organization of Antifa. Yes, I can't say I'm familiar. But we're talking about the president of the United States here. We're talking about someone who has clearly demonstrated an appetite for retaliation. Does that scare you? look, I'm rational. So fear and concern are part of the reaction. But like when you feel fear, evaluate it and decide what that means for you. And what it means for me is, look, if I'm not willing to stand up, how can I ask other people to stand up against the fear and intimidation that the administration is trying to practice? And that ranges everything from kind of brand smearing because I'm sure there's a whole bunch of people that are in the red MAGA ecosystem that go, oh, yeah, I've heard of this Reid Hoffman guy.

45:59Isn't he just a criminal? Right. Because, you know, Trump called for an investigation, et cetera, just like Trump called for an indictment of Comey, which was legitimately thrown out by, as it were, illegal process and no evidence for getting there, right? And so, by the way, it's precisely this staying silent, you know, that allows the bad stuff to happen. It's like the Germans who stayed silent in, you know, Nazi Germany, et cetera. It's like people say, well, yeah, that's wrong. And they tell themselves rationalizations. It's like, it's wrong. Sure. Could never happen again. Nothing like that could ever happen again.

46:38It doesn't really mean anything. He's just being political, et cetera. It's like, look, that's precisely the thing that degrades our society, that degrades, you know, our democracy, that degrades our rule of law. It's like, speak up. Last question on this. And I have to ask, we're speaking the week of December 15th. You know, the president has, in theory, a deadline of this Friday to release all of the Epstein files. Now, you have called for those files to be released. You've been very public on that. You said, quote, every single piece of intel that they have about Epstein. This has become a years-long, you know, political event.

47:18You know, conspiracy theories, threats of investigation, leaks, rumors. Obviously, you were tied up in this. You've spoken about it. When you push to have all of these files released, all of the intelligence release that the Justice Department has on Epstein, why is it important to you that it all comes out? And what do you think it means for the president, assuming more information is released? So first, you know, I had a small number of interactions, as you know, fundraising for MIT, have apologized for that. Once I realized what was involved in that, I was like, oh, shit, this is terrible. I'm really sorry.

47:59It's just provably factually incorrect because I didn't even know who Yopstein was in the whole, like when he was doing the criminal charges and put in prison and released as the registered sex offender and so forth. And it was all political attacking. But I didn't speak up about that because what I concluded in the original thing is that the thing that's most important is first and foremost is justice for the victims, right? Because like participating in the politicization of it is not the thing. It's like, look, this should be done as kind of justice for victims. Now, then of course this year, it goes to the, oh, we're trying to defend our own misdeeds by trying to portray Epstein as a Democrat by saying, and it's all these Democrats, Paul, when they themselves had campaigned vigorously on release all the Epstein files.

48:50And I was like, look, you guys have the Epstein files. You're going to use this as a slander tactic for politics and further harm the victims. The simplest way to give justice to the victims, release all the files. Right. Show everyone what the truth is. And I think that's part of the reason why I kind of was driven to speak up about this, because it's like, look, despite the fact that the first and foremost important thing always is the victims. The question is, if you're going to try to politicize this, then simply live in truth. Sure. The more information that's out there, the better. Yeah.

49:27Now, let me pivot a little bit to talking about the future for a few minutes. You've done a lot. You do a lot now. What do you still want to do? What is on your bucket list that at this point in your career you feel like you have not yet crossed off? Well, I do think we are alive at one of the most amazing times to be alive. Maybe the most, with the kind of AI and all the rest. This is going to bring some great early January optimism to our listeners here. So, look, you know, that's part of the reason I co-founded Manus AI with Siddhartha Mukherjee. You know, like tackle cancer, tackle, you know, a whole bunch of different diseases.

50:05I think about the fact that we'll all have an assistant, a medical assistant, an educational assistant, a legal assistant that is essentially available to everybody. It's like line of sight to making this happen. And we just have to sort out some kind of regulatory and other kinds of issues for this. That's there. That's the super agency amplification. I want to help with that. I want to help with navigating the first reaction of technology in all human history is fear first, like fear, loss of agency, et cetera, to embrace it as a pro-agency, both in terms of what we build, but also in terms of how we understand it and how we do it.

50:42There's a reason I tell everyone to start using it. I'm not saying use inflection, you know, pie, you know, the one that I, you know, co-founded, use whichever one works for you. So, you know, I did. I did play around a little bit with inflection in the last couple of weeks. I have a very handsome sounding, I think, Australian man now helping me manage my busy schedule. Exactly. So I have this thing that's basically it's humanity, then society, then industry. And so part of it is the helping humanity and society, I think, is a lifetime all the way to when like when I'm moving around on my walker, right, to trying to be due.

51:20And then obviously, you know, participating in the industry stuff in various ways, because I do think industry can be a very good way to do this. Well, and let me ask you this. Which bucket humanity, society, industry does AI fall into? All three? All. All. It's the all-consuming. Yes. It's the all-consuming future. Relatively huge technologies get to humanity level. Not zero, but not just AI, but relative to you. But AI is definitely one of them. As a society, we want to be the economic beneficiaries of this. Like, you know, England did not invent the Industrial Revolution. And yet, because they embraced it fully and early, they had a multi-century, most global power superpower.

52:01That's what the cognitive industrial revolution with AI can mean. We, as Americans, want that to be AI to be American intelligence for doing this because that matters for our society. And by the way, there'd be huge transition issues. But if you go, oh, we're all going to have a collective panic attack and attack it, then you're undercutting the economic prosperity of your children, your grandchildren, and et cetera, as ways of doing this. And so that's why embracing it and shaping it is so important. And so that's a society level. And then industry thing is, hey, you try to get the right industry things that create really good value for society and humanity.

52:37And that's part of the reason like co-founding Manus, co-founding Inflection for kind of saying, hey, if you're going to have a lifetime agent, make sure it has a really good EQ as well as IQ. Inflection was the core kind of contribution of that, both with Pi and then also other people now riffing and learning from it. Anyway, so those kinds of things. Well, I will let you know how my good-looking Australian voice does for me. Excellent. And now, before we wrap up, we're going to play a very quick game. I think you were prepared. Whether or not you thought about this or not is now your problem.

53:14Yes. The game is called Control-Alt-Delete.

53:20It's how we wrap up every show. And I want to know what piece of technology you would love to control. What piece would you love to alter, alter or change? Yeah. And what piece would you love to delete, vanquish from the earth, eliminate from humanity, society, and industry? Right. Okay. So do you want one answer for each, two answers for each? One. Let's be disciplined. Yes. So, okay, control social media for kids. Right? I think that one of the things that most of the world doesn't really understand is Silicon Valley is also broadly in line with this, which is, like, if you have kids engaging with this, it should be in ways.

53:59that have the kind of protections that we generally have for kids and including parental involvement and so forth. So social media for kids. Great. Alter, you know, I think it's like let's go kind of shape AI, right? We want it to be American intelligence. We want it to be embodying the views that we aspire to as Americans in terms of empowerment and freedom and economic prosperity. and we want that to be, you know, kind of, you know, the American offering to the world. So that would be the shape and kind of alter and participate in. And then, you know, maybe delete, although this is, you know, it's very hard for me to do delete in technology versus just shape.

54:42Like there's a lot more alter. But basically, like I think that we want to be thinking about our collective media systems as how we learn collectively. and so how do we have disinformation being weeded out by the operation of the system in terms of people learning collectively what is true? And like, you know, vaccine misinformation is the example that I most often get. So, for example, if I could delete disinformation at scale, I would do that, but it has to be through a collective learning process. Well, I think in this game, for the sake of the game, I think you can say you want to delete misinformation.

55:21Yes. Which I would also love to do. Let's do it. Let's delete it. Reid Hoffman, thank you so much. Such a thoughtful conversation. I really appreciate it. I look forward to the next. Likewise.

55:38This show is produced by Jessica Alpert with help from Adriana Tapia and Sam Egan. Sound design, mix, and original music by Pran Bandy. Kate Osborne is our executive producer. And I am, of course, your host, Katie Drummond, Wired's Global Editorial Director.

56:08Do you ever feel like you blinked your eyes and then woke up in some kind of sci-fi movie? Suddenly it seems like the very existence of AI is changing everything, including our relationships. I would like to think that I could not fall in love with an AI companion, but I really think that anybody could. I'm Oz Velozhin. And I'm Cara Price. We break down the tech news you really need to know. Listen to Tech Stuff in the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.