Reid Hoffman on Building AI and Other Tech More Responsibly

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 25 April 2023

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As a founding board member of PayPal, cofounder of LinkedIn, and a partner at Silicon Valley VC firm Greylock, Reid Hoffman has long been at the forefront of the U.S. tech industry, from the early days of social media to the launch of new artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT. He acknowledges that technologists are often better at seeing the benefits of their products and services than they are at predicting the problems they might create. But he says that he and his peers are working harder than ever to understand and monitor the downstream effects of technological advancements and to minimize risks by adapting as they go. He speaks about the future of A.I., what he looks for in entrepreneurs, and his hopes for the future. Hoffman is the host of the podcast Masters of Scale as well as the new show Possible.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Are you trying to bring your leadership skills to the next level?
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0:24.0	New episodes every Wednesday.
0:30.0	Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review.
0:40.0	I'm Allison Beard.
0:42.0	When any new technology comes along, people, especially those in the tech industry itself,
0:53.0	tend to get really excited about all the good it's going to bring.
0:56.0	Social media connects people around the world, crypto democratizes finance,
1:00.0	generative AI, superchargers productivity, and so on.
1:04.0	The evangelist crowd is loud and proud.
1:07.0	But as we've seen over the past decade, the potential downsides at the latest tech innovations
1:12.0	don't always get as much attention.
1:14.0	Yes, you'll see some skeptics warning about unintended consequences and negative externalities.
1:21.0	But it doesn't seem like industry insiders, the people building and deploying these new tools
1:26.0	and the leaders overseeing that work, are thinking all that hard about what challenges they might inadvertently create.
1:33.0	Our guest today is an unabashed techno optimist.
1:36.0	He really does believe in the power of technology to improve our lives.
1:40.0	But he also knows how important it is for tech companies to think more carefully and responsibly about the problems they're trying to solve
1:47.0	and the products and services they're putting out into the world.
	...

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