SUPERAGENCY: What Could Go Right With AI?

The Next Big Idea

Next Big Idea Club

Self-improvement, Arts, Books, Society & Culture, Education

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A recent Pew Research survey found that most Americans are more worried than excited about AI. Reid Hoffman, however, isn't one of them. He knows the risks — arms races, runaway superintelligence, the whole humans-being-turned-into paperclips scenario — but he's still convinced that AI is poised to usher in an era of extraordinary human progress. And as you'll hear in this episode, he makes a pretty good case. Reid is the co-founder of LinkedIn, Inflection AI, and Manas AI, a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock, and host of the podcasts "Masters of Scale" and "Possible." Just this week, he published a thrilling new book called "Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future." Today, he tells Rufus why he's "unequivocally very optimistic" about AI (and why you should be, too), how he's using AI in his daily life, and why he doesn't think DeepSeek is as much of a game-changer as some people say. 📱 Follow The Next Big Idea on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

Transcript

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0:00.0	LinkedIn Presents.
0:05.2	I'm Rufus Grisgham, and this is the next big idea.
0:09.9	Today, Reid Hoffman on why he's optimistic of priests. I know that sounds into a room full of priests.
0:38.4	I know that sounds like a joke, but this is a real thing that happened a decade ago.
0:42.9	At the time, Reed was the executive chairman of LinkedIn, the social network he started in his living
0:48.4	room.
0:49.2	He figured the priests would want to talk about that, about social media.
0:53.8	But these men of the cloth had something else on their minds.
0:57.7	Artificial intelligence.
1:01.2	Reed admitted to his robed audience that a world awash with AI felt so far away from him it was impossible to know what to expect.
1:08.4	Remember, this was 10 years ago.
1:10.5	The challenge, he said, is figuring out the unknown unknowns.
1:14.6	That's what Reid has been focused on ever since. Months after he said goodbye to the priests, he signed on as one of the first philanthropic supporters of OpenAI, which launched in 2015 as a non-profit research lab.
1:30.3	When Open AI established a for-profit arm a few years later, Reid led the first round of investment
1:35.3	and joined the company's board. In 2022, he co-founded his own AI company, In Flection, alongside
1:42.3	Mustafa Suleiman, one of the most respected AI entrepreneurs in the game.
1:48.0	And this week, he published a new book called Super Agency, where he shares his insider perspective
1:54.2	on what the best version of a future powered by AI could look like.
1:59.9	Back when he met those men of God, Reed struck a worried note.
2:04.4	We humans, he told them, are the model of an intelligent being.
2:08.7	But any form of AI is actually a different species.
2:12.4	It's not copies of human beings, he warned.
	...

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