Reid Hoffman: Unlocking Limitless Human Possibilities With AI | Artificial Intelligence | E333

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25:17And what gap did you see in the AI world? Why did you get on board with that? So that's how we start 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 one 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 to that because if you look at even the very earliest of how other people would think about agents they were thinking about as information processing and work and we were thinking about this as a trusted companion for how you'd operate.

25:56And so EQ was as important as IQ. So we trained the inflection model pie, 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, you know, 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 shifted to kind of a more of a B2B model where the pie 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.

26:39So it's a classic startup journey, in addition to being 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?

27:19And says, well, my pet died today. And it's like, well, I respond A or respond B. Which one's a 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 anyway, Oh, that's too bad. You should really look up a grief counselor. Okay. And option two was, oh, that must be really hard. Oh, my gosh.

27:54Is 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 because you don't want to make false anthropomorphism. But say, 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 is, oh, 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.

28:29And by the way, there's a bunch of human beings who are also not very empathetic who learn to be more empathetic just by, you know, kind of, okay, this is the way you do this. So 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 an unfortunately short supply these days, generally, not just with AI.

29:01Trust 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. That's 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 can be empowered, that will be the kind of thing that builds the kind of positive trust in these kinds of circumstances.

29:40And 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 it's 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 and which things should I not? And the answer is, well, if you generally should understand that a company is trying to have you as a lifelong loyal customer, that generally speaking, most of them are smart about doing that.

30:21So 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 and I go, you know, huh, that doesn't really make full sense to me. I'm going to look at this a little bit more because it's like, OK, if it said something about like, yeah, your lab, you're, you know, your black lab can eat that mushroom. It's like, no, I really want to know. Yeah, I'm going to double check that. You know, so and so, you know, that kind of thing. And by the way, over time, these will get better and better for how it operates.

30:54And 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, OK, 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.

31:37And I write a newsletter that I write personally with all my industry knowledge. And sometimes I'll just be like, well, what would ChatGPT 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.

32:16law? 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 the depth of experience, the early involvement with OpenAI and all the rest, 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.

32:56Okay, 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 at a premium, but it will grow at a premium in the use of the tools too. Like you can't just bite, like, I am genius.

33:32I don't need AI. It's like, no, no, I am genius because of the way that I use AI to be an extra special genius. We were talking about deep fakes 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.

34:14So 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-aggrandizing? 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.

34:50Like if you said, well, would I only want to talk to read AI? Absolutely not. But would I want to talk to read AI sometimes in 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 I was, 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, you know, ranging from Hindi to Chinese to Arabic to all these things.

35:28and 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 it is, 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 Paris. Who knows? But it was humanizing. I thought I would really dislike it.

36:05And 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. Oh, my gosh. 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.

36:37I 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. Like people really can't tell. And we're working on my AI video. And to your point, like people probably think I'm crazy creating my own deep fake. 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. You know, people love to watch content all over the world. then not everybody speaks English.

37:12Not 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 learned 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 advertisers of ourselves because we have all this content.

37:55Yeah, absolutely.

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42:11Quo, no missed calls, no missed customers. 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 5, 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.

42:47And so people thought in the 80s we're going to get AI, but we didn't get AI. We got the internet. We got mobile phone. Well, maybe now we're going to get AI. I mean, you know, 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 like 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 superagency 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.

43:23Especially when you consider the, even though there might be just one agent, Pi, that's kind of then instantiated with what it remembers out of its conversations and interactions with Hala, what it understands or remembers in its conversation and interactions with Reed, et cetera, et cetera. There's kind of this flow of agents. Now, one of the things that I think people haven't really fully tracked yet, but I think will be very 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?

43:53Well, one of our preps will be your agent will talk to my agent. Oh, my gosh. 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 da-da-da-da-da and, you know, 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, will be much higher. My guess is, for example, if you go back 30 years and you told someone there were going to be these jobs called web designer, data scientist, other things, they go, what are you talking about?

44:36You 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 they're, maybe I'll 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 neuromancer with 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.

45:13But by the way, if you read Neuromancer, 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 profiters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

45:51So to become more profitable tomorrow, I guess I won't say literally tomorrow, like since one day, 24 hour. I would say the important thing, 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 and patterns of how you deliver your business, supply chain, et cetera?

46:24And 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 where which things are the new living creatures and which things are the dinosaurs in the future markets. 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 UU, I said life is a team sport.

47:06Because the Startup UU 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 this 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. Amongst our team. Yes. With our team, we'll also have agents and everybody will have agents.

47:46Reid, 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. You know, I post just about everything there. I also have reedhoffman.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.

48:20Okay, 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?

48:54Technology 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.

49:32Put 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 profiters. We are the most equipped to handle this AI revolution because we're creative, industrious, innovative.

50:13We know how to manage, delegate, motivate. We know how to let go of control. We know how to handle this, Young and Profiters. 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 Profiters. Thanks for listening to this episode of Young and Profiting Podcast. If you listened, learned, and profited from this conversation with the legendary Reid 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, CastBox, Player FM, wherever you listen to your podcasts.

50:51And 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 podcasts as 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 gonna invest super heavily into video this year.

51:29And 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, at yapwithhala. Put a face behind the name, why not? You can also find me on LinkedIn. I'm hard to miss over there. Just search Halataha.

52:04And a big thanks to my Yap 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 plus team at Yap who puts out A plus work. And that's why we got A plus money in the bank. This is your host, Halataha, a.k.a. the Podcast Princess, signing off.