Welcome to Hard Talk from the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker.

My guest today is a member of the American Technology Billionaires Club, the so-called

tech bros, whose businesses have transformed the way we live and work in a single generation.

Reid Hoffman made his first fortune as a founding board member of the digital payment system, PayPal,

where he worked alongside two other tech pioneers, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

Back then, they were close. Now, not so much.

Hoffman went on to found LinkedIn, the social media platform dedicated to professional networking,

now used by hundreds of millions around the world

in pursuit of career advancement. In recent years, Hoffman has been a major investor in artificial

intelligence, and he currently sits on the board of Microsoft, inflection, AI, and a number of other

AI ventures. For many, inside the tech industry and in the world

beyond, the rapid advance of AI capabilities, far beyond the large language models capable of

generating sophisticated text, raises troubling questions. As machine intelligence becomes ever more

potent and autonomous, what happens to human agency and value?

Are we unleashing a power we cannot or will not control?

Well, Reid Hoffman joins me now.

Welcome to Hard Talk.

It's great to be here.

Well, it's great to have you here.

I wonder if you would acknowledge that right now there is something of a crisis of public

confidence in technology as a force for good. I think there is, although I think there shouldn't be.

And it isn't because I'm just, you know, I spent my life in the tech industry and I build

...