Reid Hoffman, billionaire, entrepreneur and venture capital investor, is concerned about artificial intelligence, but not because of the doomsday scenarios making headlines. Instead, he worries that the headlines on doomsday are too negative.
So over the past few months, Mr. Hoffman engaged in an aggressive leadership regime to extol the virtues of AI. He’s done this in blog posts, television interviews, and fireside chats. He has spoken to government officials around the world. He hosts three podcasts and a YouTube channel. And in March, he published a book, “Impromptu”, co-written with the AI tool GPT-4.
It’s all part of the public land grab around AI in preparation for when the initial outburst of fear and hype about the technology turns into a cohesive debate. Parties will be chosen, regulations will be proposed and technical tools will become politicised. Right now, industry leaders like Mr. Hoffman are trying to sway the terms of the discussion in their favor, even as public concern only seems to be mounting.
“I hit the positive drum really hard, and I do it on purpose,” he said.
Few are as intertwined with so many facets of the rapidly changing industry as Mr. Hoffman. The 55-year-old sits on the boards of 11 tech companies, including Microsoft, which has gone all in on AI, and eight nonprofits. His venture capital firm, Greylock Partners, has backed at least 37 AI companies. He was one of the early investors in OpenAI, the most prominent AI start-up, and recently left the board. He also helped found Inflection AI, an AI chatbot start-up that has raised at least $225 million.
And then there’s his more abstract goal of “uplifting humanity,” or helping people improve their circumstances, a concept he passes on in an affable, down-to-earth way. Mr. Hoffman believes AI is critical to that mission, pointing as examples to its potential to transform areas such as healthcare – “giving everyone a medical assistant”; and education – “give everyone a tutor.”
“That’s part of the responsibility that we have to think about here,” he said.
Mr. Hoffman belongs to a small group of interconnected tech executives in charge of AI, many of whom also led the latest Internet boom. He is a member of the “PayPal mafia” of former PayPal executives, including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. The latter two backed DeepMind, an AI start-up that Google bought, and all three were early backers of OpenAI. Jessica Livingston, a founder of the start-up incubator Y Combinator, also put money into OpenAI; Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, was previously president of Y Combinator.
Mr. Musk has now started his own AI company, X.AI. Mr. Thiel’s venture capital firm, Founders Fund, has backed more than 70 AI companies, including OpenAI, according to PitchBook, which tracks start-up investments. Mr. Altman has invested in several AI startups in addition to running OpenAI, which itself has invested in seven AI startups through its seed fund. And Y Combinator’s newest group of startups included 78 focused on AI, nearly double the last group.
The tech leaders have differing views on the risks and opportunities of AI and have been loudly promoting their ideas in the ideas marketplace.
Mr. Musk recently warned of the dangers of AI on Bill Maher’s show and in a conversation with New York Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer. Mr. Hoffman explained the potential of the technology to Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. Last week, Mr. Altman at a congressional hearing that “the benefits of the tools we’ve deployed to date far outweigh the risks.”
According to Mr Hoffman, warnings about AI’s existential risk to humanity overstate what the technology can do. And he believes that other potential problems caused by AI – job losses, destruction of democracy, disruption of the economy – have an obvious solution: more technology.
“The solutions are living in the future, not capturing the past,” he said.
That’s a tough pitch to an audience that’s seen the harmful effects of technology over the past decade, including social media misinformation and autonomous vehicle crashes. And this time around, the risks are even greater, says Oded Netzer, a professor at Columbia Business School.
“It’s not just the risks, it’s how fast they move,” Mr Netzer said of how tech companies are dealing with AI. “I don’t think we can hope or trust that the industry will self-regulate.”
Mr Hoffman’s pro-AI campaign, he said, aims to foster trust where it has been broken. “It’s not to say there won’t be damage in some areas,” he said. “The question is can we learn and iterate to a much better state?”
Mr. Hoffman has pondered that question since he studied symbolic systems at Stanford University in the late 1980s. There, he envisioned how AI would facilitate “our Promethean moment,” he said in a March YouTube video. “We can make these new things and we can travel with them.”
After working at PayPal and co-founding LinkedIn, the professional social network, in 2002 Mr. Hoffman began investing in start-ups including Nauto, Nuro and Aurora Innovation, all focused on applying AI technology in transportation. He also joined an AI ethics committee at DeepMind.
Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, said Mr. Hoffman differed from other venture capitalists in that his primary motivation was to do good in the world.
“How can we be at the service of humanity? He asked that question all the time,” Mr. Suleyman said.
When Mr. Suleyman started working on his latest start-up, Inflection AI, he found Mr. Hoffman so helpful that he asked him to help found the company. Greylock invested in the start-up last year.
Mr. Hoffman was also there in the early days of OpenAI. At an Italian restaurant in San Jose, California, in 2015, he met with Mr. Musk and Mr. Altman to discuss the start of the company, whose mission is to ensure that the most powerful AI “benefits all of humanity.”
Several years later, when OpenAI was thinking about business partnerships, Mr. Hoffman said he encouraged Mr. Altman to meet with Microsoft, which purchased LinkedIn in 2016.
Mr. Altman said he was initially concerned that Microsoft, a behemoth with a duty to prioritize its shareholders, would not take OpenAI’s mission and unusual structure to limit its profits seriously. With any big, complicated deal, Mr. Altman said, “everyone is concerned about, ‘How is this really going to work?'”
Mr. Hoffman helped smooth things over. He talked Mr. Altman through various concerns while donning metaphorical “hats” as an OpenAI board member, a Microsoft board member, and as himself.
“You have to be very clear about which hat you’re talking about,” said Mr. Hoffman.
Mr. Altman said Mr. Hoffman helped OpenAI “model Microsoft and think about what they care about, what they are good at, what they are bad at, and similar to them for us.”
In 2019, OpenAI and Microsoft signed a $1 billion deal that puts them in a leadership position today. (To avoid a conflict of interest, Mr. Hoffman was not part of the negotiations and abstained from approving the deal on any board.)
A little over a year ago, when Mr. Hoffman saw the progress OpenAI was making with its GPT-3 language model, he had another Promethean moment. He immediately flipped an AI switch on almost everything he worked on, including Greylock’s new investments and existing start-ups, as well as his podcast, book, and discussions with government officials.
“It was kind of like, ‘If it’s not this, it better be something absolutely critical to society,'” he said.
OpenAI released a chatbot, ChatGPT, in November that became a sensation. A Greylock investment, Tome immediately integrated OpenAI’s GPT-3 technology into its storytelling software. The number of Tome users skyrocketed to six million from a few thousand teams, said Keith Peiris, The director of Tome.
Mr Hoffman said his approach was shaped in part by his access to “extremely high quality information streams”. Some are through its business relationships with Microsoft, OpenAI and others. Some are through various philanthropies, such as Stanford’s AI Center.
And some are through his political connections. He has poured millions of dollars into Democratic campaigns and political action committees. Barack Obama is a friend, he said.
For now, he’s using his clout to paint a picture of AI-driven progress. Tech insiders applaud his cheerleading. The rest of the world is more sceptical. A recent survey by Reuters and Ipsos found that 61 percent of Americans believe AI could pose a threat to humanity.
Mr. Hoffman brushes off those fears as exaggerated. He expects the more tangible problems facing AI, including its tendency to spew out misinformation, will be resolved as tech companies upgrade their systems and deploy them to help.
Looking ahead, he said, there will be more investment, more podcasts, more conversations with government officials and more work on Inflection AI. The way to navigate the risks of AI, he stressed, is to steer the world towards the positive.
“I’m a tech optimist, not a tech utopian,” he said.
Framework Metz reporting contributed.
