Venture investor and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, 56, was one of the chief architects of the social media age. Now he's turned his attention to artificial intelligence. Besides investing in OpenAI, he's a co-founder, alongside Karén Simonyan and Mustafa Suleyman, of the Palo Alto, California-based Inflection AI. To date, the trio has raised $1.5 billion from Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, and Nvidia, among others, to build Inflection's personal intelligence AI solution, dubbed Pi.
In March, Simonyan and Suleyman departed Inflection AI for Microsoft, and Inflection announced a pivot: It would primarily focus on creating and testing AI models for commercial customers, rather than a consumer-facing smart assistant. Hoffman remains as the company's evangelist-in-chief.
In just over a year, the entrepreneur has visited the White House to talk AI with President Biden; launched an interview-style podcast called Possible, offering the “brightest version of the future” of AI and other technologies; and published the book Impromptu, which was co-authored by ChatGPT and extols the virtues of AI. Here, Hoffman shares why he's so optimistic about AI—and why he thinks you should be too.
Inc.: What's behind the charm offensive?
Hoffman: There are five billion smartphones; there could be a medical assistant on each of them. The amplification for humanity is obvious. Then go to education. If you have an infinitely patient tutor for humans of all ages on all subjects on every smartphone, think of what the amplification of human capability could be. I wanted to get that positive message out for what we can make, because this is the amplification of humanity. It can make us all very broadly a lot better.
Inc.: And what about all of the concerns? Surely, you've needed to address the naysayers.
I knew we were going to have critics, just given the direction of
