The Case for AI Optimism — ft. Reid Hoffman

“If you said the the minimum that Mythos is is an ability to have an infinite number of, quality cybersecurity engineers who are penetration testers, and it's not infinite obviously because there's a compute cost for running them, but you could take a thousand of them and run them in a direction, you end up you know, if it's just that, you end up with a rechanging of the cybersecurity landscape because we have billions of lines of code that essentially haven't been touched and partially because there hasn't been either an economic model for the number of cyber criminals or the number of people employed by rogue states to go after any other than a certain set of systems. But it broadens the range by the ability to just kinda spin up many new penetration testing engineers, you know, with a kind of an AI mechanism. And that's the minimum that I think you could look at, the the discussion around Methos and its cybersecurity issue is.”

“Every job that uses language or information will have an AI component that will range, in certain cases, from automation, in certain cases, much more AI work, and in certain cases, kind of AI amplification or augmentation of human labor. And I think that will be true of all of those things. And so almost every industry, because if you think about, like, even, like, steel manufacturer, you still have meetings, financial analysis, you know, kind of, capital, other kinds of thing, you know, legal, other kinds of things, all that play in it, you know, strategic planning, and so so that means that AI will touch everything. Now and I, by the way, inherently also agree with you that, one of the general problems when you get new technology, kind of put this in super agency, is you go, well, I can see if I take jobs as a fixed number that do not grow and do not change, and I can see that a bunch of them will be, you know, now will the horses then care the buggies will go away and we'll have cars and, like, all the grooms people will go away and all the horse carrying jobs will go away and all the horse cleanup jobs will go away.”

“The most often thing that people who are not building within the, you know, kind of cut just call it competitive business world or competitive technology world. It's like, we'll just slow everything down. Right? And you're like, okay. The problem is is competition doesn't slow down. That's actually not not the way that that kind of competition works. Like, if you just said, hey, everyone. Wait for me to get my economy in order, and then you can start shipping your export things. I mean, you know, take a look what what's gonna be happening within Europe with the spread of BYD cars from Hungary, for example. It's like, oh, no. No. Wait for a decade for us to get our auto industry in in in place. That's not gonna happen in terms of in terms of how this operates.”

“I think part of what you've seen in the large tech companies is they would prefer to be buying companies versus doing these kind of, you know, kind of strange deals, but feels that the regulatory environment is too hostile to for them to do that, especially earlier. And so are looking for other ways to make it work. And so you say, well, what's a deal that you could make work that isn't an acquisition? It's like, well, you know, get a a, like, a, like, kind of something that's not quite a BD deal, but not kind of corp dev deal. Corp dev like, it's kinda, like, halfway in between, and the measurement is, does the business continue, you know, with with vigor and effectiveness afterwards?”

“So for example, in the inflection cases, we're not gonna be able to establish our agent with building frontier models in the way that we hope. We need to pivot. So we're gonna pivot to p two b. How do we get the capital? How do we make that happen? Well, we do a deal where that that enables that to happen. But that that was a that's a that's a pivot deal, not a like, it wasn't Microsoft came along and kinda said, hey. A little bit of cash. You know? You completely upend your business. I was like, no. No. We've we've actually already decided that we need to change, and we're trying to figure out how to fund that change and make that change go through.”

“I was around, and, basically, Elon, I think, is doing everything possible to throw anything he could possibly invent at OpenAI. And, you know, among them was, you know, kind of claiming that they misled him. Like, he wanted to identify himself as a cofounder of creating it, but then it's, oh, you misled me into into philanthropic donation with a later plan to turn this into commercial. And having been around it, I know it's factually incorrect. We'll see what happens. It seems that it's like it's the kind of the definition of legal harassment, and kind of trying anything possible to kinda say, no. I didn't make a huge mistake when I basically told OpenAI that it should become a company that I own I, Elon, should own 80% north of, and if you're not gonna do it, I'm leaving. And, oh, look. The the organization did well.”