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Young and Profiting with Hala Taha
Reid Hoffman: Superagency, How AI Will Help Humans Dominate the Future | Artificial Intelligence | AI Vault
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A
Today's episode is sponsored in part by Shopify, Indeed, Revolve, Intuit, Framer, Delete Me, Spectrum Business and Northwest Registered Agent. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you grow your business. Start a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com profiting attract, interview and hire all in one place with Indeed. Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at indeed.com profiting shop the latest trends from today's top brands with Revolve. Head to Revolve.com Profiting and take 15% off your first order with code Profiting Intuit. QuickBooks Money Tools brings your money and your books together in one platform with real time insights into your cash flow. Learn more@quickbooks.com money publish beautiful and production ready websites with framer. Go to framer.com design and use code Profiting for a free month of Framer Pro. Deleteme makes it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online. Go to joindeleteme.com profiting and get 20% off their consumer plans with Code Profiting. Keep your business connected with fast and reliable Internet, phone, TV and mobile services from Spectrum Business. Visit spectrum.com freeforlife to learn how you can get business Internet free forever. Northwest Registered Agent gives you the tools and guidance you need to build a complete business identity. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com yapfree and start building something amazing. As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes or@youngandprofiting.com deals I am genius.
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B
I don't need AI. It's like, no, no, I am genius because of the way that I use AI. 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. Well, yes, we may add the Terminator robots as a negative possibility, but does the basket of risk get better or worse? And I think it just gets better.
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A
Our guest today is LinkedIn and Inflection AI co founder Reid Hoffman. In this conversation, Reid reveals how AI agents, digital companions, and emotionally intelligent bots will transform our work, our business and our creativity.
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B
Everybody's going to have multiple agents and assistants for everything they're doing, whether it's podcasting or writing or analyzing. And there will be more agents than there are people. Big tech companies who are trying to make a lot of money are building these things. And which things should I trust? These AIs on and which things should I not? And the answer is, how do you.
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C
Imagine our world to be 5, 10, 20 years in the future with AI?
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B
One of the things that I think people haven't really fully tracked yet, but I think will be very interesting, is how.
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A
What's up, my young and profiters? Welcome back to another episode of the AI Vault series. Our guest today is LinkedIn and Inflection AI co founder Reid Hoffman. Reid believes that AI isn't just artificial intelligence. It's AI amplification intelligence, a force that can massively expand human potential when we learn how to use it the right way. In this conversation, Reid reveals how AI agents, digital companions, and emotionally intelligent bots will transform our work, our business, and our creativity. And why the real winners will be the people who learn to manage and deploy AI more effectively than everybody else. If you've been feeling anxious, confused, or overwhelmed about where AI is headed, this interview will give you a fresh lens, one that feels far more empowering. So buckle up, yap fam. Here's my conversation with the incredible entrepreneur Reid Hoffman.
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C
Reid, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.
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B
It's great to be here. I've been looking forward to this.
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C
First of all, I want to say I feel very honored to have you on the show. You were a truly prolific entrepreneur. You've literally helped push the world forward for decades. You, you've been a leader at companies like PayPal, LinkedIn, Airbnb, now Inflection AI. You also were a part of OpenAI. So you've just been behind so many huge companies that have pushed the world forward, like I said. So I wanted to ask you, when you think of all your contributions to the world and all the companies that you work with, because you don't have to work right now, you choose to work. And so you must be thinking about, like, okay, what makes me want to work with a company? What is your mission? And what is the red thread with everything that you're doing in the world right now?
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B
I guess probably it's like I'm kind of, you know, to put it like, philosophically a humanist, which is, how do we make ourselves better individually and as a group? So it's empowering a bunch of different individuals lives, but also leaving the world much better than we found it and kind of, how do we do that? And, you know, that's kind of the red line through everything I do, including companies, because you want to do companies that of course, have all the normal company things of, you know, providing great products, services, and jobs and all the rest. But you also want it to be the impact that you have in the world leaves the world in a much better place. You transform industries, you transform societies. And, you know, like all the companies you mentioned, you know, that I've been involved with from the earliest stages, whether it's, you know, personally, you know, LinkedIn and PayPal, or as an investor and board member, Airbnb, OpenAI, all of it has a kind of a theory of, like, how does this improve, like, human life, human work, you know, quality of experience? How do we elevate ourselves, become more, you know, kind of the people we aspire to be?
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C
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, you know, realized its potential impact?
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B
Well, in one sense, my undergraduate major at Stanford was artificial intelligence. It was called symbolic systems, but 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 kind of a set of different people. Demis Hassabis at DeepMind, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, relative to OpenAI, 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 kind 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'll come out of it and what will happen once it's GPT5, for example. But we know that we're going to be able to create things that are like kind of capabilities, cognitive capabilities that have never been seen before, and that this is like, you know, simple ways to parallel the metaphors. Like, well, actually, in fact, every single computational device isn't going to no longer have an interface and a manual. It's just you're going to talk to it, right? You know, 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, you know, 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 kind of got the, you know, 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 scripto stuff. I did a few things in bitcoin and other things, so keep doing it. But I'm going to focus entirely in AI because I think AI is going to be the thing that is going to be the next wave. And I want to start working on it right now.
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C
And I love how you're so optimistic about AI. I've interviewed so, so many people about it. Mo Gao Dat, Mustafa, Suleiman Fei Fei Li. Like, 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, like, counterarguments to what pessimists typically say?
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B
Well, 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 and 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. And questions of advancing certain technologies around climate change. There's just a 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 kind of like well look, we're going to, it's just like the Industrial revolution with the loom and everything else and you know, 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 you look at our entire kind of lives today of societies that have middle classes and prosperous societies, it all comes from the Industrial revolution. So the other side of that very tippet 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 in 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 it in the future, we have to believe that'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? And you go, well, you know, by the way, that's called a good circumstance and we'll figure it out. And you know, 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 made do with our lives. So even if we get there, so I think that it'll 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, 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 how I 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 all the doomer and gloomers essentially are delaying that future. And that delay has a huge cost in human suffering.
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C
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.
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A
So a lot of your book is.
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C
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 know, you don't think it's going to necessarily be a bad thing if, you know, AI takes some of our jobs, it's going to add new jobs, we'll 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?
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B
Well, so 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. So when cars came out, it's 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, you know, the, the, you know, these are, you know, kind of dangerous for what happens in the streets. You know, similarly, you know, like, for example, when the phonograph had to be pitched, it had to be pitched as it's going to be used for church music because it'll help people to have church music at home because the kid, like, well, what are people going to do this with? Are they going to be distracted? Are they going to be sitting on their couch just like television doing nothing? And television is going to destroy society, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so, as a matter of fact, we had this discussion around smartphones, you know, in our, 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 very like, every single case has ended up being very positive. Now, the transitions have been difficult. The printing press, which was described as, you know, like, 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 truth 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 kind of transitions, it led to nearly a century of religious war. So you go, okay, so 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, actually, in fact, we can use both lessons from the past, these technology transformations, and we can use AI to help us. So you say, well, shoot, my job's 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? Right? Et cetera. Can 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 dock worker. It's 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 knows me, right? It's like, well, but now we have a forklift that will go, hey, sit here. Give me direction in 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 work and jobs or capabilities by the state, by other people that then get people to be highly concerned. And you're like, well, actually, in fact, you know, if we go through it, if we do it in the right way, we can, 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.
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C
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 that every human's going to have an AI companion and it's going to help them go on job Interviews, start companies. So talk to us about those kind of concepts.
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B
So part of what freaks people out a little bit is like, you know, we are going to this agentic universe. We're all of a sudden, as opposed to having phones and PCs, which we will 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 or Reed, you know, ongoing companion, always, you know, always around us and helping us with things. But there's going to be a suite of them, you know, with kind of different specialties and different engagements. And by the way, your, you know, your office is going to have one, your working group is going to have one, and, you know, probably your podcast is going to have one, you know, 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 doesn't actually, 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 think of your smartphone as 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 essentially going, oh, my God, my agency is being slaughtered. Whereas if 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 hear 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. So, yes, it always knows where I am, but it also knows where I am. It helps me never get lost. And. 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 agentic revolution. Now, some of it 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, et cetera. And it comes back to me and does that. And you go, well, that's really awesome. And you say, well, it's going to mean that the travel agents don't have a job anymore. It's like, well actually in fact, you know, 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, you know, here's the things that's normally seen like go see the Sistine Chapel in Rome.
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A
Right.
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B
You know, that's what you should do. 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 da da, da, da. And maybe like agents don't know that much about the after hours tour. Or maybe there's this, there's a midnight bike ride that might be really good that doesn't necessarily know about. So there's ways that these kind of 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 would be really good for us. But you know, part of what we, it's like for example, play with ChatGPT and see what kinds of things it writes. And at least every time I've used it so far and I suspect this will also be true of GPT5 and GPT6. I can always add something interesting to it, I can change it, I can make it like, like sharper, more distinct, you know, et cetera. And that's kind of a mode for thinking, well, why will I always have a rule 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 or last 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 you know, I for one look forward to that path.
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C
Yeah, I mean 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 as I've been going through these conversations, I've been thinking about, like, well, how am I going to be like 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 realize that it's like you have to be the best trainer of the AI. Like, I kind of imagine everybody being an entrepreneur having agents that work at their personal company, basically.
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A
And you're.
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C
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.
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A
And so I just feel like a.
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C
Lot of people are probably worried that, like, you know, 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.
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B
Yep. So I think exactly as you say, in addition to training, it's also deploying, organizing, executing, you know, strategizing all of the above. And that's part of the reason why, you know, kind of with super agency and the other kind of content that I've been trying to get out there in 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's the way, you know, 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.
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C
So I know that you co founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleiman 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? Like, why did you get on board with that?
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B
So that's how we start with Inflection. And part of that was because we said, well, what's the world 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, everyone 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 kind of even the very earliest of how other people are thinking about agents, they were thinking about as information processing and work. And we were thinking about this as kind of a trusted kind of companion for how you'd operate. And so EQ was 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 kind of being run as part of things that Microsoft's doing. And what inflection the company is doing now is providing that same kind of great 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 we 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, you know, it's a classic startup journey in addition to being an interesting evolution of the AI things.
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C
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?
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B
Well, so part of what you're doing when you're doing the kind of 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 sayings. So you have a whole bunch of humans who are running the system through and saying, okay, you know, to Prompt one, like you say, you know, like the person says, how's your day? And says, well, my pet died today. And is it, 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 he 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 they're essentially doing the training for this. And so, you know, if it said like, for example, option anyway, oh, that's too bad. You should really look up a grief counselor, you know. And option two was, oh, that must be really hard. Oh my gosh, you know, like, like, is there anything I can do to help? Is there, you know, like, you know, like, you know, 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. Make false anthropomorphism. But it's a. Look, I'm certain that connecting with friends or other kinds of things, you know, 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 kind of 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 a bunch of human beings who are also not there, empathetic who learn to be more empathetic just by, you know, kind of go, okay, this is the way you do this.
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C
Yeah, makes total sense. 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, and people are just worried about trust when it comes to AI. So what are your thoughts around that?
- [33:38]
B
So, look, trust is in an unfortunately short supply these days, generally not just with AI. Trust in institutions, trust in, you know, democracies, voting systems, other people's intent, you know, other kinds of things. So trust is challenging. Now, the way that you. That I think is 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 like what their, what their goals are, what they're doing, what they're doing to try to build and maintain trust. You know, part of the reason why, of course, you know, 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. And my advice to individuals encountering these things, 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 and 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, 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 gonna go look at this a little bit more, you know, because it's like, okay, you know, 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.
- [35:40]
C
Want to know, yeah, double check that.
- [35:43]
B
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, you know, kind of how it operates. And so I think that's, 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, you know, being accountable as creators and companies for, you know, here are the things that we warrant 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, but it could be really good for me.
- [36:23]
A
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- [40:01]
C
So I feel like we're in this like 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 like one of the most knowledgeable people about monetizing podcasts. And I write a newsletter that I write personally with like 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 like kind of just so basic, right? It's so basic, it's kind of wrong. And, and then I just love it because I'm like, okay, like people are getting my newsletter, which is like this like 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 trans where specialized knowledge from humans is actually like really desirable.
- [41:01]
B
Broadly. Yes. And part of it's obviously kind of like that specialized knowledge being evolved with like how you're figuring out how to use like you made this comment earlier, how you use these new tools really effectively. And so like part of, you know, even with the Depth of experience, the early involvement with OpenAI and all the rest. Like I constantly am trying, like asking questions, questions and trying to use a number of these tools myself for real things. Not just create a sonnet for my cousin's birthday or any of this kind of stuff, but it's also things that like investment analysis or kind of market trends or other kinds of things. And frequently, just as you said, 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, you know, you know, I've enabled the voice agents on my phones so that, you know, I can point my camera at things and talk to, you know, chatgpt about the thing I'm looking at, you know, say mushrooms, right? And so, and you know, that kind of thing as a, as a way of kind 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 buy like, I am genius. I 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.
- [42:43]
A
Totally.
- [42:44]
C
So you created. We were talking about deepfakes before and I came across this, 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?
- [43:07]
B
Well, so 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'd 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 kind of conversation. And as I said at the end of the interview, I thought I was going to hate this because like, I'm not one of those people who talks to myself in a mirror, you know, 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. Like, if you said, well, would I only want to talk to readers? Absolutely not. But would I want to talk to Reed AI Sometimes in doing these things and have that as a way of kind of having a dialogue with myself and also showing kind of what's good at. Because once I did that, one of the things I realized is after I'd made that, I was off to go give a speech at the University of Perugia in kind of defense of an honorary doctorate. And I sort of wrote out the speech and then I went, you know, I could actually have AI 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 I don't know what the story of that is, how it is to deserve 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, but who knows? Anyway, but it was like, it was humanizing with the thing. I thought I would really dislike it. And it was humanizing. And it started making me realize, just like any. Just as I say to other people, hey, you should use the technology to get a sense of it and to kind of give you. To reinforce your own agency with the technology. It was like, that was me doing that with that. And, you know, 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.
- [45:57]
A
Oh, my gosh.
- [45:58]
B
It was like, oh, that's interesting. Cool.
- [46:02]
C
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. Like, even with me, I have my AI voice. If I'm sick or if I'm, like, if I miss a commercial, we can use my AI voice as, like, an intermediate step. Like, I'll always rerecord it, usually 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.
- [46:34]
A
To scale myself and this is the future.
- [46:36]
C
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 and not everybody speaks English.
- [46:44]
B
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 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, yeah.
- [47:17]
C
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 of ourselves because we have all this content.
- [47:29]
B
Yep, absolutely.
- [47:30]
A
So one last question for you on.
- [47:34]
C
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.
- [47:40]
A
So I just want you, and you.
- [47:41]
C
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?
- [47:52]
B
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 we didn't get AI, we got the Internet, we got mobile phone. Well, maybe now we're going to get AI. We're going to get what shape of AI is the interesting question. And so if you said what I think is the minimum guarantee is there's going to be like, 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 kind of navigation. What we describe in super agency as 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 the. Even though there might be just one agent PI that's kind of then instantiated with what it remembers out of its conversations. Interactions with hala, what it understands, remembers in its conversation, interactions with Reid, et cetera, et cetera. There's kind of this, this, this, this, this, 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, you know, 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 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, when, when you ask a question this way, it'll be great. And when you answer it this way, it'll be great, you know, and 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, you know, part of that will then make, you know, like, the premium on thinking creatively, thinking differently, you know, as you mentioned, will be much higher. The notion that, you know, what we, you know, kind of like, my guess is like, 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? 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. And so I think that's the, you know, those are some of the things. But, you know, 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. And 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, but 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, you know, we're always looking for, is that surprise and delight moment.
- [51:24]
C
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. Yes, 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 profits can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?
- [51:50]
B
So to become more profitable tomorrow? Well, I'll presume, I won't. I, I guess I won't say literally tomorrow. Right. Since one day, 24 hour, I would say the important thing, and this gives 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's 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 of supply chain, et cetera. And so by looking at that kind of like 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 time frame? 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, you know, navigate the changes. Which things are the new living creatures and which things are the dinosaurs in the future markets?
- [53:02]
C
Great advice. And what is your secret to profiting in life? And this can go beyond financial profiting in all aspects of life.
- [53:11]
B
So fundamentally part of why in the startup eu I said life is a team sport because the startup EU 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.
- [53:51]
C
And now we're going to have agents with our team.
- [53:54]
B
Exactly. Amongst our team.
- [53:55]
C
Not amongst our team. Yes, with our team, we'll also have agents and everybody will have agents. Reid, 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.
- [54:13]
B
I post just about everything there. I also have reidhoffman.org and, and this year, publishing super agency.
- [54:20]
C
Amazing. I highly recommend Everybody go get Super Agency. Also get Blitzscaling. I love that book as well. Reid, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for joining us on Young and Profiting Podcast.
- [54:31]
B
A great pleasure. I look forward to our next conversation.
- [54:34]
A
Yeah, fam. This conversation with Reid Hoffman could not have come at a more pivotal moment. We're stepping into a world where intelligence is no longer limited to the human mind. And Reid's vision gives us a roadmap for how to navigate it with confidence instead of fear. His core belief is simple yet powerful. AI is here to expand what we're capable of, not shrink it. And when we understand that, everything about the future looks different. One of the standout ideas Reid shared today is a shift from artificial intelligence to amplification intelligence. He really wants us to see AI as a multiplier for our creativity, our decision making, and our impact. For entrepreneurs, this mindset shift is everything. When you stop worrying about being replaced and start thinking about how to be augmented, you open the door to entirely new opportunities. You can run experiments faster, communicate on a global scale, and build ideas fast. That would have taken teams, money, and years in the past. And something that really caught my attention was his emphasis on the rise of AI agents. These won't be just random chatbots. They're going to be specialized collaborators who help you think, create, and operate at a higher level. Entrepreneurs will have teams of agents, one for content, one for research, one for strategy. Your job then becomes orchestrating these agents for clarity and intent. If you learn this skill early, you'll gain a massive advantage, because the real competition will be between humans who know how to command intelligent tools and humans who don't. Another theme Reid drove home was the importance of optimism rooted in action. Every major shift in history, printing presses, cars, computers, came with panic and prediction of doom. But the people who leaned in, learned the tools, and experimented early are the ones who built empires. This moment is no different. Treat AI like a collaborator. Start small, test ideas, build momentum. Let your curiosity lead instead of your fear. Yap fam. Thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of the AI Vault series. And I love bringing you these conversations with leaders who are shaping the new era of intelligence. And Reid Hoffman truly is one of those minds redefining what's possible. Take these insights from today and put at least one of them into play this week, because knowledge means nothing without action. Yap. Bam. You can also watch the full video on Spotify Video and connect with me on Instagram at Yapwithhala or LinkedIn at Hala Taha. All right, gang, this is your host, Hala Taha, the podcast princess, signing off.