← Young and Profiting with Hala Taha
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha
Reid Hoffman: Unlocking Limitless Human Possibilities With AI | E333
00:50:53
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- [00:00]
Hala Taha
Today's episode is sponsored in part by Robinhood, Airbnb, Shopify, Rocket Money, NordVPN, and indeed with Robinhood Gold. You can now enjoy the VIP treatment, receiving a 3% IRA match on retirement contributions. To receive your 3% boost on annual IRA contributions, sign up at Robinhood.com Gold Hosting on Airbnb has never been easier with Airbnb's new co host network. Find yourself a co host@airbnb.com host Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you grow your business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com Profiting Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps you find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending and helps lower your bills. Sign up for free@rocketmoney.com profiting. You need NordVPN to keep your credit card details safe whether you're shopping on international websites or using public WI fi. To get the best discount off your NORDVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com profiting attract, interview and hire all in one place with Indeed get a 75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com profiting terms and conditions apply. As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes or@younginprofiting.com deals Yap Gang 2025 is a year of change for me. I'm single and there's nothing tying me down to Jersey anymore. And and so I'm looking to set up residence in Texas or Florida, and I've gotta stay there at least six months and one day so that I can save on taxes and switch up my dating pool. Now it's a toss up between Miami and Austin. I'm super familiar with Miami, but I haven't really explored Austin much. And with so many entrepreneurs raving about it, I've at least gotta test it out. So I rented a beautiful home on Airbnb with my business partner this winter so that we could try out Austin and see if it's the right fit fit for us.
- [01:54]
Reid Hoffman
Now I don't really know what I'm.
- [01:56]
Hala Taha
Going to do in terms of the city I'm living in next year for most of the year, but I do know what I'm going to do with my pad when I'm not in it, and that's hosting on Airbnb.
- [02:04]
Reid Hoffman
Of course.
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Hala Taha
The thing is, when it comes to hosting my place on Airbnb, I don't want to worry about the hosting part. I'm so busy with my company and my podcast and now Dating is also a full time job, but now with Airbnb's new co host network, I won't have to worry about it. That's right, hosting on Airbnb just got a whole lot easier. With Airbnb's co host network, you can hire high quality local co hosts to take care of your home and guests vetted on Airbnb. Co hosts have knowledge in the hosting space and can help get your investment properties set up for you. Imagine having somebody who can handle reservations, guest communication and on site support so that you can handle other things. Now, while I'm busy finding myself a cowboy, you can go find yourself a co host@airbnb.com host.
- [02:51]
Mustafa Suleiman
This is going to generate magic and there will be more agents than there are people. The future is sooner and stranger than you think.
- [02:58]
Reid Hoffman
You co founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleiman and you're really creating companions for people.
- [03:04]
Mustafa Suleiman
We've moved from the computers being the bicycle of mine to AI being the automobiles of the mind. Let's figure out how we want the technology to evolve, how we're going to use it, how we use it together, how we use it individually. Human beings will be replaced by other human beings using AI and in some cases by AI. But there will also be a bunch of new jobs created too.
- [03:23]
Reid Hoffman
Why are you so optimistic about AI?
- [03:26]
Mustafa Suleiman
Because I think AI is going to be the the future is already here. It's unevenly distributed.
- [03:45]
Reid Hoffman
Yap Gang, welcome back to the show. Today we are playing part two of my episode with Reid Hoffman.
- [03:52]
Hala Taha
Reid Hoffman is an incredible entrepreneur. He's the co founder of LinkedIn and Inflection AI. And in part one of this conversation we focused on entrepreneurship.
- [04:01]
Reid Hoffman
So if you haven't heard that yet.
- [04:02]
Hala Taha
Make sure you stop and go back and listen to that one first. Especially if you're an entrepreneur. We talk all about blitz scaling, we.
- [04:10]
Reid Hoffman
Talk about his early failures as an.
- [04:12]
Hala Taha
Entrepreneur, and he uncovered so many gems.
- [04:15]
Reid Hoffman
In this conversation, you don't want to miss it. If you've already heard that one, go enjoy part two of this episode on AI, where we're going to learn everything that he believes AI will bring to our future, including our own personal AI agents. It was an incredible conversation.
- [04:32]
Hala Taha
You guys are going to blow your mind with this one. So without further delay, here's my conversation with the incredible Reid Hoffman.
- [04:40]
Reid Hoffman
AI is definitely transforming the world and I know that you're doing a lot in AI, so let's start talking about that. When did you first get interested in AI and realized its potential Impact in.
- [04:52]
Mustafa Suleiman
One sense, my undergraduate major at Stanford was artificial intelligence. It was called Symbolic systems. It was kind of the earliest undergraduate AI major. But then I concluded the time wasn't right and I went off to do other things. And then it was discussions with a set of different people. Demis Hassavis at DeepMind, Sam Altman and 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 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 we're going to be able to create things that are capabilities, cognitive capabilities that have never been seen before. And that, you know, simple ways to parallel the metaphor is like, well, actually, in fact, every single computational device isn't going to no longer have an interface and a manual. It's just you're going to talk to it, right? Or everybody's going to have multiple agents and assistants for everything they're doing, whether it's podcasting or writing or analyzing or speaking or comprehending. And all of this stuff is going to help. Or another way of putting it is anything that has any computational units at all is going to become much more intelligent. All of these things come from this scale compute learning revolution. And that was probably 2014. 2015 was when I really got the vision hit me fully. And I went to my partners at Grelock and I said, hey, look, I think we're going to still make a bunch of money doing this crypto 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 next wave and I want to start working on it right now.
- [07:09]
Reid Hoffman
And I love how you're so optimistic about AI. I've interviewed so many people about it, Mo Gao Dat, Mustafa, Suleiman, Fei Fei Li, just everyone from people who started a long time ago on it to the new guys, and everybody kind of has a different mix. Like, some people are really positive about it, some people are pretty pessimistic. All, why are you so optimistic about AI? And can you give us some counter arguments to what pessimists typically say?
- [07:35]
Mustafa Suleiman
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. Oh, then it's really bad. We should have a cautionary principle. And you're like, well, that's if you thought that the only thing here was creation of terminators or not. So, like, for example, take this is called existential risk. Let's take existential risk. Existential risk is a basket. It's not just are there killer robots or not, it's also nuclear war, asteroids, pandemics, climate change, a bunch of other things. So you say, well, if we create AI, is the basket, well, yes, we may add the terminator robots as a negative possibility, but is the basket of risk get better or worse? And I think it just gets better because it's the only way I can think of to solve pandemics. I think it's already helping in questions of advancing certain technologies around climate change. There's just 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 just like the Industrial Revolution with the loom and everything else and moving to the power loom. And we're going to have that, that's going to have a disruption in society. There's going to be challenges with that guaranteed. But on the other side, like when you look at our entire lives today of societies that have middle classes and prosperous societies, it all comes from the Industrial Revolution. So the other side of that will very much look like the similar kind of amplification of what we've had here. Now you say, what does that mean for jobs? Now, obviously we know we need them for economy and people's sense of purpose and sense of commitment. And you say, look, what we're going to have is all this transition by which we have amplification intelligence. The thing I described my last book before, Super Agency Impromptu, which is AI means amplification intelligence. And so human beings will be replaced by other human beings using AI and in some cases by AI. But there will also be a bunch of new jobs Created too. And just like we didn't have a chance to really envision 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, by the way, that's called a good circumstance. And we'll figure it out. And we've had societies like European and other nobility where there was entire groups of people, classes of people who didn't have to work and we 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 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, that's one of the things that I think is super important. And that's what we're like. All the doomer and gloomers essentially are delaying that future. And that delay has a huge cost in human suffering.
- [11:07]
Reid Hoffman
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.
- [11:16]
Hala Taha
So a lot of your book is.
- [11:17]
Reid Hoffman
Talking about human agency, right? And the concerns around AI and human agency. You talked about it with jobs. Right. And the fact that you don't think it's going to necessarily be a bad thing if AI takes some of our jobs, it's going to add new jobs. 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.
- [11:52]
Mustafa Suleiman
Thank you for reading the book and asking questions from it. So look, what people don't realize is every new major general purpose technology has a discourse that's very much like parallel to the one we're having today, which is this new technology is going to destroy society. When cars came out, 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 these are dangerous for what happens in the streets. Similarly, for example, when the phonograph had to be pitched, it had to be pitched as. It's going to be used for church music, right? Because it'll help people to, like, have church music at home. Because the kid, like, well, what are people going to do this with? You know, are they going to be distracted? Are they going to be sitting on their couch just, like, television doing nothing? And it's, you know, television going to destroy society, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so, as a matter of fact, we had this discussion around smartphones within our memories. And so the thing to remember is to say, yes, it's going to completely change the future. It's going to change the future in the way that we experience our agency, how we think of ourselves as kind of operative agents, what we're capable of doing, what other people are capable of doing. But that change has thus far always ended up being very positive. Now, the transitions have been difficult. The printing press, which was described as, oh, it's going to destroy human cognition by reducing the ability of memory. It's going to create a whole bunch of misinformation. The 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's. It led to nearly a century of religious war. So you go, okay, the outcome can be really good, but what do we do about the transitions now? One of the things I'm pointing out in the AI context and part of the reason for writing Super Agency, and part of the reason for doing this is to say, well, 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, you know, 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 the AI help me with the transition? And so what we need to be doing is learning from the past and these lessons and transitions and then deploying the technology to help us do that. Because one of the amazing, unique things about AI is it's the first technology that can do that. Previously you were like a dock worker. It's like, I'm a big, strong person. Well, that doesn't help me learn how to Use a forklift. Right 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 the people, that then get people to be highly concerned. And you're like, well, actually, in fact, if we go through it, if we do it in the right way, it'll be magical, I think, anyway. But it can be less suffering on the path to being magical and better navigated if we do it the right way.
- [15:49]
Reid Hoffman
So when you say super agency, basically what you're saying is we have human agency with AI. They'll be helping us become better humans, and that's why we have super agency. And then AI itself is going to be able to do things on its own, right? So can you talk to us about how AI will have agency? And then how do you 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 gonna have an AI companion and it's gonna help them go on job interviews, start companies. So talk to us about those kind of concepts.
- [16:22]
Mustafa Suleiman
Part of what freaks people out a little bit is we are going to this agentic universe where all of a sudden, as opposed to having phones and PCs, which we 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, ongoing companion, always, you know, always around us and helping us with things, but there's going to be a suite of them with kind of different specialties and different engagements. And by the way, your, you know, your office is going to have one, your working group is going to have one, and probably your podcast is going to have one, et cetera, and it'll be here fairly soon. And people say, well, if they're agentic, does that take my agency away? And the answer is no. The same way that when you work with colleagues and you work with employees and everything else, that expands your agency, that doesn't take it away. So the agency is, I think, extremely important here. But by the way, a lot of it's kind of the mindset, like if you 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. They go, oh gosh, I, I'm, 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 be 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, right? So yes, it always knows where I am, but it also knows where I'm at. It helps me never get lost. And so therefore it can be an amplification of my agency and it changes what the landscape of my agency is. And so I think that's part of what's so important about thinking about this new 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, travel agents will change because it'll be AI plus travel agent. But like, you know, it might be a little bit more along the lines of, here's the things that normally seen, like go see the Sistine Chapel in Rome, right? 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 agents don't know that much about the after hours tour. Or maybe there's a midnight bike ride that might be really good that, you know, doesn't necessarily know about. So there's ways that these kind of the pulling things together. And by the way, these agents will be making predictions off all the data, which is a lot more than any of us have, about what things would be really good for us. But 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 sharper, more distinct, et cetera. And that's kind of a mode for thinking, well, why will I always have a role in the Things that Really matter? Is because I'll figure out how to add something to it in a useful way, even as it gets much more powerful. Now, if you look at it today like one of the things that I'm a little always bemused by is people say, I saw two articles in one day earlier this year which was, all that AI is good for is faking homework. AI is going to destroy all jobs. And you're like, okay, part of that's like right now, you're like, look, there's a very long way away from all this amplification that everyone's talking about. I mean, there's some that's right here, right now that's really spectacular. But there's a long journey, a long path, a long role for human beings to be participating in various ways and to be evolving and changing. And I for one look forward to that path.
- [20:12]
Reid Hoffman
I have to say, thinking about agents is so mind blowing. And when I think about AI and all the talks that I've had, a lot of people talk about it as being like a great equalizer. And we were just talking about how humans are not going to work and everything like that. But I'm competitive, right? So like, as I've been going through these conversations, I've been thinking about like, well, how am I going to be the best version of me? How am I going to be like a better entrepreneur and compete? But now as I've thought about it more, I realize you have to be the best trainer of the AI. I kind of imagine everybody being an entrepreneur having agents that work at their personal company. Basically, you basically have to be the best at coordinating your agents and figuring out how to mobilize all that AI and all your AI support. And so smart people are going to be smarter at that, right? And Creative and innovative people are going to be more creative and innovative when it comes to their own agents. And so I just feel like a lot of people are probably worried that there's not going to be any room for them to your point as humans. But I really think it's going to be how you manage your AI exactly as you say.
- [21:18]
Mustafa Suleiman
In addition to training, it's also deploying, organizing, executing, strategizing, all of the above. And that's part of the reason why with Super Agency and the other content that I've been trying to get out there 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 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. 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, you know, 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.
- [22:17]
Hala Taha
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- [24:21]
Reid Hoffman
You know how it goes.
- [24:22]
Hala Taha
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- [27:21]
Reid Hoffman
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? Why did you get on board with that?
- [27:42]
Mustafa Suleiman
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, there's going to be more agents than people. Everyone's going to have an agent that's their own personal agent that they have trust with and is on their side. And what are the key attributes of that? Because if you look at even the very earliest of how other people were thinking about agents, they were thinking about as information processing and work. And we were thinking about this as a trusted 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 being run as part of things that Microsoft's doing. And what inflection the company is doing now is providing that same kind of best in class iq, but also best in class EQ to businesses that want to deploy this within their ecosystem, to their customers, to their products and services. So it shifted to kind of a more of a B2B model where the PI agent is more the kind of exemplar of one of the unique models that inflection has that it can deploy for your particular business challenges. So it's a classic startup journey, in addition to being an interesting evolution of the AI things.
- [29:06]
Reid Hoffman
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?
- [29:15]
Mustafa Suleiman
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 sayings. So you have a whole bunch of humans who are running the system through and saying, okay, to prompt one. Like, you say, the person says, how's your day? And says, well, my pet died today. And 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 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 if it said, for example, option A was, oh, that's too bad, you should really look up a grief counselor. And option two was, oh, that must be really hard. Oh my gosh, is there anything I can do to help? I feel for you. Or, you know, probably wouldn't say that just because it's an AI, but it's like something because you don't want to make false anthropomorphism. But to 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. And 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.
- [30:58]
Reid Hoffman
It's really cool what you guys are doing at Inflection AI.
- [31:01]
Hala Taha
So one of the things that I.
- [31:02]
Reid Hoffman
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?
- [31:16]
Mustafa Suleiman
Look, trust is in an unfortunately short supply these days. Generally not just with AI. Trust in institutions, trust in democracies, voting systems, other people's intent, you know, other kinds of things. So trust is challenging. Now the way that I think it's going to be very important to build and maintain trust with AI is for the people who are building it to be very clear about what their goals are, what they're doing, what they're doing to try to build and maintain trust. Part of the reason why, of course, my encouragement with super agency is for people to go try it. Because as they begin to try it and learn what kinds of good things they can do, what kinds of things 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, 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 shouldn't, you should understand that company is trying to have you as a lifelong loyal customer. That generally speaking, most of them are smart about doing that. So they're going to try to make it good. If it's something that's particularly important to you, cross checking, it's important like, you know, When I go to GBD4 and get a prompt and I go, you know, huh, that doesn't really make full sense to me. I'm going to go look at this a little bit more because it's like, okay, if it said something about like, yeah, your lab, your black lab can eat that mushroom, it's like, no, I really want to know.
- [33:05]
Reid Hoffman
Yeah, then double check that.
- [33:07]
Mustafa Suleiman
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. And so I think that's the kind of thing, but I think that's the only by engaging and using, having dialogue, having that dialogue match our experience over time, being accountable as creators and companies for, you know, here are the things that we 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 it could be really good for me.
- [33:42]
Reid Hoffman
I feel like we're in this transition period where humans that have a specialized expertise right now are at such an advantage. So, for example, I have a podcast network, and I'm probably one of the most knowledgeable people about monetizing podcasts. And I write a newsletter that I write personally with all my industry knowledge. And sometimes I'll just be like, well, what would ChatGPT say? And then it's all wrong. And it's just so basic.
- [34:10]
Hala Taha
Right?
- [34:11]
Reid Hoffman
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.
- [34:37]
Mustafa Suleiman
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. Okay, fine. And sometimes I go I iterate on it and sometimes I go, oh, no, no, I think that's just not very good right now. I'll use it for other things, but using it constantly. So I have, I've enabled the voice agents on my phones so that I can point my camera at things and talk to ChatGPT 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 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.
- [36:00]
Reid Hoffman
We were talking about deepfakes 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?
- [36:20]
Mustafa Suleiman
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 it 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 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 was more interesting as kind of a palette and exploration. Like, if you said, well, would I only want to talk three days? 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'd 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. And to give the speech in those languages where people are much like. It was bizarre listening to me, my voice speaking Hindi or Chinese fluently. It's like, what would I sound like if I were speaking Chinese? Now, one of the things that my French friends told me is my French sounded like Canadian French. And, you know, I don't know what the story of that is, how it is to serve Moro data, audio samples of Canadian French. Or somehow it goes, well, you're North American, so we're gonna make you from Quebec rather than Paris. Who knows? But it was humanizing. I thought I would really dislike it. And it was humanizing. And it started making me realize, just as I say to other people, hey, you should use the technology to get a sense of it and to reinforce your own agency with the technology. It was like, that was me doing that with that. And we continue to do new things with Read AI. Probably one of the funniest ones was the number of different press outlets that asked, we'd like to do an interview with Read AI.
- [38:49]
Hala Taha
Oh, my gosh.
- [38:49]
Mustafa Suleiman
It was like, oh, that's interesting. Cool.
- [38:52]
Reid Hoffman
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 gonna 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.
- [39:25]
Hala Taha
And you just gave me such a.
- [39:26]
Reid Hoffman
Great idea in terms of the translations. You know, people love to watch content all over the world, and not everybody speaks English.
- [39:33]
Mustafa Suleiman
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 their 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.
- [40:05]
Reid Hoffman
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.
- [40:16]
Mustafa Suleiman
Yep, absolutely.
- [40:19]
Hala Taha
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- [41:27]
Reid Hoffman
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?
- [41:47]
Mustafa Suleiman
Well, one of the things that's a great way to look foolish in the future is make overly specific predictions. Partially because the usual principle I 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. 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 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 and interactions with Hala, what it understands remembers in its conversation, 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? Well, one of our preps will be your agent will talk to my agent.
- [43:10]
Reid Hoffman
Oh, my gosh.
- [43:11]
Mustafa Suleiman
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'd be great. And when you answer it this way, it'll be great 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 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? You, you know, crazy person from the future. And I think that's another thing that we're going to see even more of, which is like, oh, didn't realize that was going to be the job, huh? And that's cool. Those are some of the things. But I try not to make overly specific predictions because usually they're. Maybe I'll put it this way. William Gibson, science fiction author, has a really good quote, which is, the future's 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, well, 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 we are always looking for, is that surprise and delight moment.
- [44:41]
Reid Hoffman
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 profits can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?
- [45:04]
Mustafa Suleiman
So to become more profitable tomorrow, I guess I won't say literally tomorrow, 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'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, supply chain, et cetera. And so by looking at that probable guess, how do you run the experiment today that informs you about which big choices you need to make in that one, three and five year timeframe? The experiment won't necessarily make you profitable, but the experiment may give you the thing that either gets you to more profit or also helps you navigate the changes. Which things are the the new living creatures and which things are the dinosaurs in the future markets?
- [46:07]
Reid Hoffman
Great advice. And what is your secret to profiting in life? And this can go beyond financial profiting in all aspects of life.
- [46:15]
Mustafa Suleiman
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.
- [46:49]
Reid Hoffman
And now we're going to have agents with our team.
- [46:51]
Mustafa Suleiman
Exactly. Amongst our team.
- [46:53]
Reid Hoffman
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?
- [47:07]
Mustafa Suleiman
Well, LinkedIn, you know, I post just about everything there. I also have reidhoffman.org and this year publishing Super Agency.
- [47:15]
Reid Hoffman
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 Podcasts.
- [47:26]
Mustafa Suleiman
A great pleasure. I look forward to our next conversation.
- [47:33]
Hala Taha
Okay, guys, that's the second installment of my two part conversation with the amazing Reid Hoffman. He had so many great insights about how we should think about AI and where it's headed. And I've got so many takeaways from this conversation. But here's my most important takeaways from this chat. First, big picture. New technology changes industries and that's what AI is going to do and that's what it's going to do to your industry. So you need to get in front of it and ask, what does this technology mean for my business, my product or service? And how will we operate as a company? To get ahead of this technology also breeds fear and paranoia. And the conversation that me and Reid 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 Reid 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 Reid put it, if we do it the right way, it could be magical. Put simply, AI means amplification, intelligence. We're going to be having AI agents on our phones and devices that become our personal assistants, our tutors, our medical and financial advisors, and so much more. We're going to be having capabilities at our fingertips that we can't even imagine today. We can't even foresee what the future is going to be like. And when you think about who's going to thrive and flourish in this world of super agents, it's going to be the people who have managerial experience. Experience. It's going to be the entrepreneurs. Young and profits. We are the most equipped to handle this AI revolution because we're creative, industrious, innovative. We know how to manage, delegate, motivate. We know how to let go of control. We know how to handle this Young and profiters. AI is going to multiply what you're capable of. It is not going to replace you or your business. We're gonna ride this wave. Young and profits. Thanks for listening to this episode of Young and Profiting Podcast. If you listen, 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 and it just means the world to me. I love to read your reviews. It makes me feel motivated. It's great for our social proof and I'd love for you guys to drop a review and help spread this podcast by word of mouth. Young and Profiting is a gem for all the entrepreneurs out there. Please tell your friends, tell your family, tell your colleagues, tell all the entrepreneurs in your life that they've got to listen to Young and Profiting podcasts. If you guys like to watch your podcast 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 going to invest super heavily into video this year and I just interviewed Mel Robbins in person. I interviewed Gary Vee in person. I just had Sahil Bloom in person. That didn't come out yet. So I'm doing so many more in person videos and I absolutely love it. It's making me a better interviewer. It is just so much better for chemistry and I've just been really digging it. So check out YouTube for all the video content. If you guys want to follow me on social media, I always post like fun stories about my life on Instagram 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 Hala Taha and 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.
- [51:41]
Reid Hoffman
We're so picky about who we hire.
- [51:43]
Hala Taha
So we've got the A plus team at YAP who puts out A plus.
- [51:47]
Reid Hoffman
Work and that's why we got A.
- [51:50]
Hala Taha
Plus money in the bank. This is your host Hala Taha AKA the Podcast Princess signing off.