hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler today I am literally sitting here with Reid Hoffman at Greylock Reed needs no introduction but most notably recently he has published a new book impromptu amplifying our Humanity through AI which
has made the Wall Street Journal bestseller list and the book is co-authored with gpt4 Reed welcome always great to be here let's try some GPT questions over a five to ten year time Horizon will the demand for lawyers go up or down
in the U.S uh it's interesting I think it will go up why up um I think it'll go up because I think the questions around sorting out who owns what and so forth and the the degree of kind of risk management and detailed legal contracts will actually
go up because of the amplication that AI is as amplification intelligence and there's this all new class of entities right that will need legal treatment exactly what's the optimal liability regime for llms so right now if I Google how to build a bomb I build a bomb I
kill people right no one can sue Google and it's just my fault yes how will it work how should it work for llms that's an extremely good and precise question a classic Tyler um and this is what the lawyers will be working on right yes exactly I think
that what you need to have is the llms have a certain responsibility to a training set of safety not infinite responsibility but like part of when you said like what should AI regulation ultimately be is to say there's a set of
testing harnesses that you should be like it should be difficult to get an l m to help you make a bomb and not it may not be impossible to do it like my grandmother used to to put me to sleep at night telling me stories about bomb making and I couldn't remember the C4
recipe could you it would make my sleep so much better if you could you know like there may be ways to hack this but if you if you had uh a uh extensive test set within that out within the test set the llm maker should be responsible
outside the test set I think it's it's it's the individual well that mean no standard over time as jailbreaking knowledge spreads well I think jailbreaking knowledge will spread but I think it's you know just like cyber security everything else I think it's an
arms race and so I think um and part of what we'll do is we'll have ai hopefully um more on the side of angels than on on Devils um that's part of the reason I'm an advocate for acceleration move fast the future do not pause Etc because it's
part of being more safe there and putting aside truly malicious acts like bomb making where else should there be liability on the llm company say it books a vacation for you to Hawaii that you didn't want to take and it's non-refundable
uh should you be able to do some tiny civil suit and get your money back from the yeah I think look I think there's some degree of where we need to have some categorization a regime of where are you relying on it um um but I actually think that the provider of the llm
should have it be like it should be pretty reliable that it doesn't book the vacation without confirming with you like that kind of thing should be totally within their doable skill set and so they should be accountable but say there's some volatility to
plug-ins because you want a fairly creative Ai and you don't have enough money to afford it you know a reliable AI to book your trips and then a creative AI to tell you Bedtime Stories and you use one thing for whatever reason or you get confused
well I think if it's you're confused because you're using just like you're confused about hitting the submit button that I think it's your responsibility but I do think that the the developers of these and the things that are the
things where they are much better at providing the safety for individuals than the individuals then they should be liable because that's that's part of what will cause them to make sure that they're doing that will there be autonomous AI llm or bot agents that
earn money depends on what you mean by autonomous uh no one owns them maybe you created it but you set it free into the wild it's a charitable gift it'll do amazing proofreading for anyone Gratis I think autonomy is one of the lines that I
think we have to cross carefully so it's possible that there will be such autonomous AIS but it's one of the areas like self-improving code autonomy um are areas that I pay a lot of attention to because right now I'm as you know a huge advocate of its
amplifying human capabilities right and being a personal AI being a a co-pilot to the to the stuff that we're doing and I think that is amazing and we should just do when you make it autonomous you have to be much more careful about what it's
possible side like what other implications might happen and so let's put aside destroying the world and killing people it's about to tell stories it gives you comments on your papers it does useful things but someone could even sell it to a
shell Corporation the corporation goes under no one owns the bot right like you can't actually stop autonomy it seems to me so it will happen look I think to some degree you know one of the earliest regulations we'll see is that every AI
has to essentially be provisionally owned and governed by some person um you know and I think that so there will be some kind of accountability chain because like if you're using it for cyber hacking and so we say I didn't use like that bot was doing marketing
but that bot was doing cyber hacking but I wasn't me it's like well but you were the person who was responsible for it there's always a thinly capitalized Corporation again I'm talking about positive productive Bots yeah that would be autonomous but like for example today
corporations have to have owners have to have Boards of directors there is human accountability there so but you die and test it the company goes bankrupt you give it away it comes from Estonia you can't trace it something's encrypted it
just seems to me there'll be a lot of bots they'll reproduce for darwinian reasons and we have to face questions about them even if we like to ban them look I do think raising the question is good I'm not trying to resist the question
um what I am saying is I think that our that um developers and I do think it's totally like uh you you can hash it with Bitcoin they can earn money you know uh run things themselves I think there's various ways that you could get a uh a self-perpetuating bot process even on
today's Bots which aren't really creatures they're more tools right you could set up the tool to do that totally doable what I am saying is we as a human society human tribe shouldn't necessarily ascribe any legal rights to that we shouldn't necessarily allow
autonomous Bots you know functioning because um that would be something that currently has uncertain safety factors and I'm not going to the existential risk right just even cyber hacking and other kinds of things so it's kind of
it's a yes it's totally technically doable but what we should Venture into that space with some care what we wanted is tax their income otherwise they're arbitraging against labor which might pay 40 percent tax the bot pays nothing it's not a legal entity
you'd rather Legalize It tax it regulate it but some government will do that yes even if ours doesn't well and I also I think you know even if you say well it's a bankrupt company but the bot's earning money then the company's earning money
we do have tax regimes or companies so I think there is there is things but I think we would want to do that but I also think you want to like for example um uh self-evolving um without any eyes on it strikes me as another thing that you should be super
careful about you know letting into the wild and matter of fact I think at the moment if someone had said hey there's a self-evolving bot that someone LED in the wild I would say we should go capture it or kill it right today
because we don't know what the the services are right so that's like I think one of the things that will be interesting about these bots in the wild will Bots Rescue the demand for crypto what else will they use for money right
yeah well I think that that's part of the like one of the talks I gave on crypto 10 years ago was even without these llms I could set up a a bot that could pay itself could pay its uh its server fees and everything else in crypto and then right you know uh um uh
eulogies or or or praise to read Hoffman for for all time you know just as an entertaining like autonomous bot exactly who or what in government should regulate llm's new AI products people say government regulation but like where is it the FDC Department of
Commerce National Security establishment well I think since AI is going to transform every agency I think there will actually be uh uh needs in each of the Departments uh right now because I think secretary raimondo is is a uh is super smart
capable leader and understands the tech reasonably well I would go with Commerce and there's nist and a bunch of other things I do think also some attention to National Security all of Jake Sullivan you know there's all U.S context I think
is is useful too part of I've talked with both of them part of my recommendation to them has been that we will um there's so many better things in the future including safety including alignment with human interest that the slow down narrative is is is is
actually dangerous that the that the narrative is actually much better to say which things do we want need to protect against EG AI in the hand of bad Human Being Bad actors is the thing to pay attention to will the new AI product strengthen the
executive branch and the U.S government huh um since those National Security issues again even if you're not a doomster there's clearly issues and it seems when National Security issues come to the Forefront the executive branch has more
power whether one likes that or not well and look there's reasons why we have an executive branch there's a reason why in many countries the executive function's even stronger even including parliamentary systems because it kind of
aligns the executive with a the Parliamentary Branch um I do think that the general rise of Technology should make the executive branch stronger in various ways like one of the things I've been advocating for a number of years we need to have a secretary of
Technology not just a CTO because if technology is a drum beat of Industries and a bunch of other things you know having that be a first-class citizen where you're doing strategy and everything else around I think is really important so I think the short answer is
yes but in our system it's a little incoherent let's say you have a coalition system like on the continent with proportional representation does there and you have a governmental AI does every party in the Coalition have the ability to access it
uh I think that would be a good thing I do think that part of the reason why um I helped stand up open AI was on the board for a number of years is broadly provisioning safe AI to as much of humanity as many businesses as possible including as many political parties and
all the rest is I think a good thing uh amplification but you left some parts that won't be open right yeah yeah well because you have to do safety like so for example everyone's like going well that we thought open meant open source
no no Open Access with safety Provisions open source is actually not safe it's less safe so you're a small party in Northern Ireland you're part of a coalition government right in London you can just tap into the world's strongest
computational power no risk of Chinese bribing people in this small party can you use the AI to run your campaign to be re-elected in Northern Ireland you have to give access to the opposition party like what within government rations access to the really powerful
stuff that's not just open to the public um which branch of government should do that which standards yeah well clearly the notion to reinforce one particular party like we try to make the parties as as equally armed as possible for a
democratic purpose right you would want to do that so you wouldn't say you have unique access uh for doing this it'd have to be equally uh capable uh whether or not it's equally intelligently used is a different question but equally capable across it I do think that the
the general speaking like part of the reason why I you know kind of deeply share the open air mission is to say how do we provide beneficial AI to as many individuals human beings and as many organizations and as many institutions
as we can is I think a really good thing what is the media ecosystem look like in this world so let's say a lot of people rather than reading the New York Times are going to Twitter they just ask their AI read it for me tell me what's new it seems there's another layer of
disintermediation or is it like BuzzFeed where people won't want that it will just go under and will more or less be back to the universe we have now um well I think the AI personal assistant for everything you do is I think upon us
sure it's part of the reason why is you know with Mustafa Suleiman I launched a product last week called Pi with inflection which is a personal AI for your life and I think that'll true for every professional activity and so I think processing information like I
think part of when you say well AI can be used for cyber attacks well you have ai can also be used for defense it could be integrated in your mail system saying hey that looks like it integrated with your phone saying oh this sounds like
it's your child calling for money but you should check on a fishing system so the defense stuff is is you know kind of also totally doable it's one of the reasons why accelerating to a safer future is important and so I think that'll be there for all of it now
will it be I actually think we're quite some ways away from where you and I will send each of our AI personal assistants to do this Podcast chat I think we'll still be here we might be looking at it where it says hey ask Tyler this
question or ask read this question um and surely you can read my Twitter feed for me right yes pull out the 20 best Tweets save me time what happens to Twitter in this world are they themselves disintermediated just as Twitter disintermediated a lot of blogs um
well I think you see what I'm saying oh no I do see writer problem of sorts yeah you may be cutting out some key levels of infrastructure you know I don't know I think ultimately my guess is it would would be it's not because you know to reflect back uh a
point that I heard you make but I now I now I now plagiarize you uh shamelessly which is look we have these AIS that that play chess play chess better than human beings no one watches ai's playing chess but we do watch now more than ever
human beings playing chess and I think there's a little bit of the human beings tweeting thing which even though you're getting a summary people may still want to go tweet themselves watch other people tweet so I I would guess no that
it doesn't get completely disintermediated but um it might just send me the 10 best links like I could email you a Twitter link yes but if no one's reading Twitter no one's seeing the ads yeah uh maybe there's one bot that pays a fee to
access Twitter gets the blue check and then just mails around links to others or I don't know it seems maybe not problematic but it will be a big change of some kind okay I think changes they are coming they're here I would say yeah let's say in this new world I want to
have influence through writing so it used to be write a blog write a sub stack write for New York Times what's the new thing you can do now that you couldn't do before to have influence oh um well um look I think the creativity thing is uh
the creativity ability amplifier with AI so for example in impromptu I have things that are poems I have light bulb jokes I have a whole bunch of stuff that normally wouldn't be within my quick skill set but I can I can do that so it amplifies me
um I think there's a whole bunch of application within the current things like I can do things um that I couldn't do before um I do think that we will figure out some versions like I've been thinking I mean I know you yourself are a great uh kind
of student of art I've been thinking about what kinds of Arts you can create um and and the fact that art can be like for example with this stuff you can literally make interesting forms of Art where every x times x sequence seconds or whatever that you're in front of
something it's new and never replicating right you know so so that's a form of medium um I do think that the question around like for example like even in writing like um obviously it's a like you you a book is made a book is made about AI with AI
hence impromptu but like for example we'll have the impromptu chatbot up along with it and so people wanted to talk to the bot talk to to the book and elaborate on it the Bots there and by the way maybe we'll talk to other Bots that when you're saying hey I'm this
thing I'm working on so I think there's a whole stack of amplifications that will lead to some radically new things um put aside money income let's say someone comes to me they say Tyler spend a year talking to this Ai and then you
grade it and at the end of it all there'll be a Tyler Cowan bot it'll be excellent should I do that yes and and how long should I spend doing that um well I wouldn't spend a huge amount of time right now because I think that
technology will get a whole lot better for it over the next X years um but I'd start playing with it now and then I would start looking at where that's useful like I've thought about like where would be the things like we do podcasts right it'd be fun to
actually have a read bot that would be available on social media and everything else and people had a question about an amplification of some part of the discussion you and I are having and the read bot could answer that'd be great so
at some point soon investing in the Tyler bought the read bot that's the new way to have influence uh for sure what will replace homework in our schools oral exams projects where you work with GPT homework done in class uh well I think you'll have all of those but I
think you'll still have homework look part of it like even looking at we're gonna have a whole bunch of tools that help teachers help grade a bunch of other stuff but even if you took chat chibi today and say I was wanting to teach a
class on Jane Austen and her influence on um you know uh English painting then what I could do is I could as a teacher go to chat gbt other a lots construct 10 essays with my own prompts hand them out to the students and say these are D pluses
right yeah you know so go use the tools and make it better right as a way of doing it and then that's the way that you could still have homework and they're using chat EBT and it causes them to be much better at thinking about like what makes a great essay uh how
would I suppose just the mechanics of of all the writing it like what what could I innovate on the structure could I have a bold or new contrarian point and argue in an interesting way like that kind of provocation is is a way that we get
again human application so I actually don't think homework is going away although I do think all the things you mentioned will also be growing too ten years from now will people be worse writers and which other ways might we be stupider
well like for example I think people are probably by default were spellers um just because we had spelling things and and you know we have spelling but you learn correct spelling from the spell check right yeah but if GPT can write for you as well as you can write
you may never learn to write from scratch to say you and I both have done for many years well okay so so I think yes that's probably a little harder like I can't hand write essays now as well as I can type them um because you know handwriting is
mostly signature or or brief notes um but just as you were mentioning the quality of my being able to understand what a great essay in producing it and everything else a great writing is goes up because of it that even when I'm
using it for like how do I write in a uh an email response to Tyler about his provocative comment about art maybe I'll use gbt to help me do it but then I got a much under better understanding of oh on a higher level of quality in that discourse is what percentage of the
American population do you think we'll take an Amish kind of approach to GPT models and the new AI one percent ten percent whether they should or not but they just won't do it won't let their kids do it probably in the well it'll probably
start a little higher it'll probably start at kind of like call it 20 25 and it will probably shrink to five what's the killer app for multimodal GPT What's It Gonna actually do for people that they'll be thrilled about above and beyond what it's doing now the
expression of creativity like uh you know one of the things that um if you haven't gotten you will get but like I'm I'm doing a chapter in impromptu which is like a Star Trek uh plot involving the person so like if we haven't sent you the Tyler Cowan Star
Trek plot yet you're gonna get it um and um and I think that kind of like people uh want to express themselves in these Arenas and the multi-model models will give them the superpowers of expression which will also mean a lot of content generation will also mean you
know amplification of how we communicate and discourse what I send you as a present um how we uh go on a vacation or go to a conference together anyway as you know there's no sharing function in the main current llms is this genius
is this oh they're just no product people in these companies does this mean oh Med is going to own everything sooner or later because they know how to do sharing how do you think about that absence of a sharing function uh I think it's coming I think it's coming and you
think that will dominate the market yes I think but I think there will also be many providers of AIS just like I think there will be a number of different uh chatbot agents in that play different character roles in your life just like
different people play roles in your life how will gaming evolve uh well it's been funny that it's evolved more slowly than I expected but like like just like I was discussing the art like think about games that like like have Virtual Worlds whether they're
exploration or combat or or strategic games whatever where the world is invented as you go you know in that in that in that format and and and and and and NPCs will be super interesting even in multiplayer games and like where they
the game itself is is itself a like a new frontier how many games will you yourself create using AI I I don't believe that number is well okay I guess I'm making a prediction um at least a thousand is the future open source or proprietary or in what in what ratios
huh I'm not sure that the ratios I think it both will be Amplified but what's the right way to think about the division well I think um proprietary is kind of a classic set of things one is the kind of safety issues we were talking about before but
also like uh certain things will be like access to very large compute uh access to certain sorts of customers or business models uh you know kind of business position on those things will tend to lock in certain kind of proprietary things on the other hand I
think there will be a bunch of Open Access as well as open source uh side of things I think one of the things about open Ai and and what it's doing with Microsoft is I think like uh people will be broadly provisioned in this stuff so
I think there will be a ton of open access to this which is part of the reason why I think the um you know like like I think the you know it's beyond the sky is the limit relative to you know what kinds of expression and creativity we're going to
see what's the chance that we're in a new AI winter and the next 10 years we'll just spend developing applications of what we have that will be amazing but the sequel to gpt4 won't be that much better the chance that we won't have over at
least five years really interesting progress is rounds to zero because even if the raw capabilities for say say it was like you know you're you're an oracle from the future and you tell me that the real scale curve kind of limited at gbd4 and there's not much
coming there's still a bunch of tuning there's still a bunch of product specialization there's still a bunch of you know making a good for teachers and students making it good for doctors making good for but that's applications
right like big breaks but even though well a gpt4 feels like witchcraft compared to two yes and maybe we'll just have 10 years where nothing feels like witchcraft compared to four oh so what's the chance that there is there's no more astounding very low
um I mean look look at for example what Alpha full did with protein folding and I think that application of this stuff and tuning it within lar like particular kinds of like biological sciences and other things I think there's line of sight to more
things what's the most important binding constraint preventing us from being at that next stage right now is it quality of data degree of data the system itself just raw horsepower what is it I think it's compute then Talent then data and when you say compute you
mean we just need to buy more gpus and spend more money and it may or may not be worth it for companies and also how you organize the compute like there's a there's a whole thing about when you're in the lead you know how to build the computers
um you know which configurations are work working or not um how to run them what the training runs is it isn't just take these algorithms apply it there's a whole bunch that's part of what it gets the talent as well um is the you know there's a bunch of
people who have had failed large models um using the open source uh techniques and so on because there's there's talent and know-how and learning and all of that that's that's part of it that's kind of between the compute and talent
it's both elements anyway so there's a whole stack of things 10 years from now how important will the price of electricity be uh well I think the price of electricity is always important if we get fusion and I think it is good to be working on
especially carbon uh the fusion will be slow even if you're optimistic right yes 100 which is one of the reasons why you know I think along with you I'm a huge advocate of nuclear fission as well right um I think obviously we should be doing everything possible on solar uh and a
bunch of others but I think uh electricity like the AI Revolution is the the the cognitive Industrial Revolution is powered by electricity and so super important so it's like the Dune world with spice but it now it's electricity yes
um and uh and uh the the electricity is part of what both creates and helps you see the future just like spice what did you think of the Dune movie by the way you must have seen it spectacular um like almost like a painting like one of the scenes made me think of
Caravaggio uh I think you know exactly which scene yes uh given the art and uh and I'm impatient for the November 23rd release of of part two given GPT models which philosopher has the most risen in importance in your eyes in fireside chat Bots I brought in
Wittgenstein and language Games first Maybe Who Um who else is good um now I happen to have uh read Vic and shine at Oxford so I uh I have I can comment on some depth but the question about language and language games and forms of
life and uh how these large language models might mirror human forms of life because they're trained on human language is is super interesting questions like Vic can shine um other good language philosophers um I think are uh are interesting that
doesn't necessarily mean philosophy of language philosophers all uh kind of analytic philosophy but the um like uh Gareth Evans kind of theories of reference as applied to how you're thinking about this kind of stuff is super interesting
um you know like uh Christopher peacock's uh concept work is I think interesting anyway so so there's there's some there's some there's some there's a whole range of stuff and then also the philosophy like all the Neuroscience
stuff you know applied in with the large language models I think is very interesting as well and what in science fiction do you feel has risen the most in status for you oh for me uh not in the world we don't know yet but yes we don't know you think oh this was really
important you know Verner vinger well this is going to be seen maybe like a strange um uh answer to you but I've been re-reading David brin's uplift series very carefully because the theory of um how should we create other kinds of intelligences and what should that
theory be and what should be our shepherding and governance function and symbiosis um is a question that we have to think about over time and he kind of went straight at this in a biological sense rather than but that that's you know
it's the same thing just different substrate with the uplift Series so I've I've been I've recently reread the entire uplift series when you can talk to a dolphin what will you want to ask it um uh what do you what do you what are like almost like one of the
things I love is these words that are in some languages and not others uh you know whether it's like Como rebe or or or Ubuntu or you know like all these different things because it's these kind of different lenses of human experiences
it would almost be like what are the words in dolphin that aren't in our language and can you try to through a through an ocean Darkly try to share what what it is that concept that you're gesturing at to learn it that would be
the question I would most be interested in answering and by the way I'm funding a thing called the Earth species project which is an early effort to try to get at this which will be the easiest animal for us to learn how to talk to in essence it will it be
Dolphins chimpanzees chimps yeah and we share uh not just a bunch of biology but kind of a world that we're navigating um but we sort of talked to them already exactly gorillas that's what dolphins were what are you saying yeah but you could actually tape the Dolphins apply
an llm to it yes right that should work yeah well that's what Earth species project is working on and what do you think that costs we don't know I mean we're just we're trying to get the taping and we're trying to trying to we're trying to see
what have you learned about friendship from working with llms um I would say I haven't learned anything in particular about friendship yet although the way that I got to impromptu was as you know I've been working for decades on a on one or more
books about friendship and so I started using uh gbd4 as a as a personal assistant for research assistant on this which is I think one good thing that everyone should use these things on and you know in depth of doing it and so I started asking questions that I've
always been wanting to do research on like like how would you compare and contrast uh uh Chinese conception or friendship with a western conception of friendship and you know that question wasn't very good but the question on
menchis and give me some understanding of mentions or lautzer and their applications of theory of friendship was was interesting it's it's it's kind of uh The Prompt directing I actually prefer directing versus engineering as a thing but the prop directing is as
getting good uh research assistance what have you most learned about yourself working with llms um well I think this is one of the things we always learn like for example you know five ten years ago we were we were beating the drum on the Turing test
and now we sailed past the Turing test and almost no one's really talked about it and and we learned like oh actually in fact what were unique is not the Turing test it's these other things and so what I would say is and I'm
interested in creating pie and inflection among others but I'm interested in creating AIS that ask good questions but I'd say currently um anybody who's good at asking questions is much better than gpd4 right like gbd4s generational questions is not
that good I suspect you tried to generate questions no I didn't absolutely did not right well but for most guests I do yes well but but the but the gpd4 suggestions are kind of vanilla they're just not that interesting it's like ask Tyler about
economics and and the what's going to happen in in on you know macroeconomics in the next decade uh not an interesting question the Wittgenstein question that's interesting question you know like right uh and so that um I I don't
think there's anything structurally it doesn't but like I tried to get it to generate a whole bunch of questions and complete failure but I think you get better questions from it if you don't ask it what should I ask Tyler what should I ask greed if you come up with
what's the weirdest question you can imagine concerning both science fiction novels and llms I think you'll get a better question well we'll try it my guess is it still won't be as interesting as a question you or I could generate in a minute or two
on the same prompt how will human aspiration change due to llms hopefully get greatly Amplified that's that's everything that I'm trying to like like our aspirations should be uh very ambitious and I think uh llms and AI should should if anything increase them
one thing I've learned is I never get sick of watching The Magic at first I thought well for how long will I still get kicks from this yes but it's still running right it hasn't hasn't asymptoted for me yes exactly what will happen to social trust as a result of
llms go up go down how will it change well unfortunately probably initially go down uh and everything from Deep fakes and a bunch of uncertainty and you know we're already kind of you know because humans trusting humans is another issue
that we have I'm hopeful that maybe we can begin to figure out some ways to have shared discourse shared discovery of Truth and I would love to have uh llm work helping and amplifying that and that's part of what I'm you know doing at
Stanford with human-centered AI and other places because it's it's really important to solve thinking globally which group or groups in the world will be the biggest gainers access and use of AI stuff will be amplifying and so therefore people who
are using it will be gaining so the access to it and the amplification I think will really matter but say I I gained from it but I'm doing fine I just can't gain that much no matter how good it is my theory is people say in Kenya
where there's a lot of internet access that's good enough they'll have some cheaper open source model and the young Kenyans who are very smart and ambitious will gain enormous amounts and the AI itself will send to it trusted intermediary information about their
ability and they will in fact get phenomenal job offers from other places and they will gain the most now that might be wrong but that would be my answer so I think that's true although I think that's because uh the more that we have a good Global connectivity the more
we have of Rise of talent from everywhere and AI added to that connectivity will exactly amplify that and I do think that the notion of like human amplification like the people who are best Amplified or best connected into you know our Global
ecosystem and I think we all benefit from it it's one of the things that you and I share about the joy of amplifying talent from everywhere um is that actually in fact amplifying Talent benefits all of us or the mediocre word sales the biggest losers
yeah when Mark Andreessen Got Away happy so to speak uh funny um I'd say the losers are people who are uncurious who want to live in the past who um who don't care about learning the future uh in a at a broad base and you know like it's like we have a term for
this luddites right it's it's it's it's the you know we're we're having a you know the AI you know Steve Jobs said that um uh computers are the Bicycles of the mind we now have with AI the steam engines of the Mind should a co-authored book with an llam
have First Amendment protections and again you have such a book impromptu I'd say the llm shouldn't have first uh Amendment but I think co-authors like I can own the first amendment protection like it's what I say but it can always hire a co-author right
for some nominal sum where the co-author adds a few words it's a co-authored output once you allow the co-authored work through the door anything can be co-authored and who knows who did how much of the work well I think that you're granting First Amendment rights
to llms which may be I'm fine with but is that an implication well I don't think you have to Grant the rights to them you have to have a a person who is saying this is me I own this like I actually think but they'll be a company
that hires such people known for their obedience yes to go along with what the llm wants yeah and they'll pay the person a quarter the person will add three three words to the thing look can today you buy someone's First Amendment
rights speeches you know like like uh write a free speech Yes because you can you can pay them and and give them the thing to say um that's just a thing but that doesn't necessarily mean the alarms themselves have those those rights your background with LinkedIn which
features of llms do you feel that's given you a better or deeper appreciation for with with LinkedIn well you're bringing a different conceptual Matrix to everything including llms so you've done LinkedIn for quite a while obviously key role in its creation and
how does that make you see llms differently and I have my own hypothesis but I want to hear yours well um so one of the things that I did when I was doing this is we've kicked off a product which is I believe live now at LinkedIn
called bizpedia which is trying to provide a in-depth Wikipedia for all of the information that professionals might need or anything like what are the different career paths what is job skills like how how would I do this particular job better how do I learn it
if I if I wanted to transition and get into it and it's again that human amplification so we couldn't we couldn't afford to do all that stuff but we could get the LMS generate the Baseline of it and then we can use the human Network to
amplify it and that's that was at least one kind of thing that I thought about with it it obviously also has real implications in Search and matching like you know hey which people should meet each other or five I'm looking for
someone to solve this particular business problem it could be hiring could be sales could be partnering could be information obviously there that all gets Amplified my answer would be this there were uses of LinkedIn that might appear Anodyne to a lot of snobby
outside observers but are super useful to people who do them and I think llms will be the same so people in poorer countries they wanted to write a business plan for them the business plan will sound to mckinsey-like to please a lot of people who think they're better
than that but in fact it will be super useful uh yeah I think that's true and I also think that again in the human amplification look I think it's like oh look I could write the business plan I don't need to it's like well but but you
adding to it will make it a lot better yes but I think also your LinkedIn background it makes you more sympathetic to a partial subscription model which babies the future for llms well it's definitely a future for sure um uh and what percentage don't know
could be 20 could be 80 do you think subscription is the economic future of llms for the next 10 years um well I think it's definitely a future but by the way LMS as has already been announced will be used to generate advertising
you're allowed to use hindsight here but as a talent scout yourself how do you think of the strengths of Sam Altman in doing what he's done look I think this is an amazing Gift To The World by Sam and the entire team uh Sam I think assembles
great people and helps them with high ambition I think that's one of the things that is you know underdescribed about Sam um I think that he also you know he doesn't try to make himself the hero role he catalyzes other people that's one of the reasons I think he is also
one of the good people to be leading the kind of safety thing because unlike you know a set of people who tend to have Messiah complexes you know it's only safe if I bring it to you he goes and gets a number of people involved and
doing it I think that's another strength as part of it and I think he his um his ability to think super big has been helpful here I mean he frequently thinks something is going to be here tomorrow where I disagree with him I don't think it's going to be
here even he's younger than I am even in his lifetime um but like that ambition is awesome open AI right now I think they have about 375 employees during the critical breakthrough period of course they had even fewer is that a new model of some
kind or is it the old model but it's the alliance with Microsoft that makes everything work mid Journey I've heard is like 11 or 12 employees which is crazy right yeah look I think well and Instagram uh when Greylock funded it was 13 employees right so it's it is a model
of generally it's an amplification of the general software model where you can have very small teams that produce things that are our comedian lovers that move the world now you do need in all of those cases massive compute infrastructure so like AWS existed for
Instagram and so forth like it's so it's that kind of so you you need that in order to make it happen but a small team of software people can can create amazing things how is higher education going to change and exactly who or what
will do it well as you know higher education is very resistant to change it actually is believe it or not yes um and so you know and and yet it should be changing it should be reconceptualizing its way that it amplifies young people you know it it
launches them into the world and it should be providing llms that are tutors and helpful it should be having llms that are helping professors do research and communicate with each other you know like Ai and doing all this stuff like it
should be embracing all of that with full force and yet um most of it is is is is is I think ignoring what's currently happening what actually breaks in the system because of that who Rebels well uh you know it's easy to read the Tea Leaves of the
future in the past you know Michael Crowe at ASU you know doing amazing work I think he will trailblaze uh Ben Nelson at Minerva we had him on our possible podcast um like I think these folks will eventually get other people to say this
is where the world's going and it's really good and so students will switch to the institutions that are doing a better job yes and you think that will and the network effects are not too strong to stop that no here's a general question quite removed
from the world of AI I've discussed this with Patrick Hollis in a fair amount it seems to me that after World War II most of the Western World maybe all of it we've simply stopped building beautiful neighborhoods there's plenty of beautiful individual buildings
artworks music whatever but actual complete neighborhoods as a whole they're now basically boring and mediocre even if they're very pleasant to live in why did that change you know maybe you can challenge the premise if you want no I maybe
um look at it I I don't know if I would speculate it's because it's the general kind of industrialization that makes it you know hey figure out what what is the the thing that is closest to what most people want and produce a lot more of that right um maybe it's that
um but medieval towns in Europe they're beautiful there's a certain same yes to them but we admire the beauty all the more so it doesn't seem it seem that it's sameness per se it's lowering the aesthetic quality well it could be production costs right
uh and that's part of the industrialization like it's like the now how do we how do we produce each one at a at a kind of lower marginal cost I I would I would hope that what we will see with like for example like I was literally talking to
someone last night who was creating a speakeasy for their house and what they did to work with their designer is they went on to a mid-journey and they created a whole bunch of different images and and again the range of creativity like I hope that
is what our future is and that's what I'm that's what I'm trying to beat the drum on to get us there what is it about our current culture in America putting aside politics but culture that concerns you most culture well I would say uh
uh um and obviously ties to politics a little bit but I I think a culture that says we should have civil discourse to get to reasoned arguments and information which obviously include science about what should be is the thing that is like what
you know what kicked us off from the Enlightenment and from the Renaissance and it's important to to keep that in our fundamental bones and genetics and we are straying from it in very very dangerous ways and it's not just on the crazy right stuff with you know election
nihilism and all the rest you obviously see that in wokism and everything else too and I think that's where you know I think the the two uh sides of this both left and right would be surprised for me to say you're in this respect you both have the same disease and we need
to be talking about like how do we reason our way to like kind of Truth and understanding and that that's super important it seems that a lot of mental health indicators have become worse in this country maybe all but more so for young
people why is that well I don't fully know I do think that we've certainly seen the indicators get worse is it because um kids are always connected to kind of like it's like a little bit more Lord of the Flies they always connected to other
kids is it because they have the insecurities of of seeing you know of being Amplified like cyber bullying following you into the home um is it because the technology is not built the right way to try to reinforce mental health I think we can do that
like part of the thing is how do we help Provide support like you can use AI to help Provide support on this I think it's a good thing to do um whatever it is it's an important thing for us to work on now we're sitting here in the suburbs in
Menlo Park but will AI save the San Francisco Tech scene or is that just going to vanish because of poor governance well I think in many ways San Francisco is doing everything it can to to to to to to uh self-emulate on the tech scene
um uh but there's some major triumphs as of late right yeah and they're in the city yeah yeah they're not on Sand Hill Road yes um yeah but it's it's it's throughout the entire Valley but yes open AI is amazing and I do think that there is
Network effects throughout of all of Silicon Valley and you know my advice to San Francisco just as my advice to many other things is try to channel the stuff that's going on here to help all the rest like for example I was like look don't try to resist the tech industry
being in San Francisco try to channel it to helping with you know the various problems whether it's uh uh homelessness or crime or other kinds of things and and to try to help those problems because you can for example you could use cameras
to help with a whole bunch of the crime problems 10 or 15 years ago it seems we had so many Tech CEOs either in their 20s or possibly even teenagers seeing considerable success it doesn't seem we have people in that age range anymore
uh like Sam Altman he's I think 38 Maybe 37. so why are CEOs older now the more important ones what's changed well look I think we will see some new additional Young Folks and look the history of the kind of status quo is is CEOs tend to be older
um I think it's it's the younger CEOs that tend to be the the the new startling companies I mean remember there's not just Tim Altman there's also Patrick ollison there's also Brian chesky there's also those sorts of folks and they were CEOs when they were
younger and I am confident there will be a new crop of them before too long but what if it's the case there's less low-hanging fruit the abilities you need are more synthetic social networks are more important this will favor the 35 year olds rather than the 19 year olds
could that possibly be true uh it's possibly true I mean they're definitely industrial Cycles where uh uh you know you have to spend more time building up your um position to get the Capital Credit to be entrepreneurial bold in charge Etc
that's definitely been cycles of that in history um so I don't think that I don't think it's impossible but I do think it's a little bit like you were gesturing with small groups doing stuff with software because you can have small groups doing
yourself a software you'll still have young CEOs young Founders she or he will still be new blazing entrance into the into the world change leaders and the Bay Area as a whole you think that will remain as important as it's been yes
categorically yes if there's a tech startup scene that is currently underrated in the world or in the US where would that be well I'll say something mildly provocative just because it's entertaining not Miami um since there's this whole crew that's
like Miami is the future um and I I think the network effects of talent and everything else is is much more uh here in other places I think Austin is doing um really interesting things I think New York's doing interesting things I think
London's doing interesting things um surprisingly I think there's interesting things in Paris and Berlin Sweden or yes or no uh Sweden yes um uh you know obviously Spotify and a bunch of other stuff I mean they punch way above their population weight
um but since they're a small population they don't tend to have a lot of immigration I tend to think you need those to really get the the flywheels going any hope for Poland plus Ukraine or you don't see it yet uh I hope for it I don't see it yet and obviously you
know there's other difficulties that are impeding right now but to say it's centered in Poland people from Russia and Ukraine they go to Poland yeah Poland becomes a new center with Talent basically from three nations were totally possible
how much do you worry about low and declining fertility as a social problem further west for East Asia um well so one thing that I thought about um writing an essay on maybe I still do it is um it isn't oh God the robots are coming for our jobs it's oh God can the robots
get here soon enough um because when we get to like our whole system has been based upon the fact that we have a growing population so that the growing population can take care of the elderly if you don't have that you have a serious reorientation of our entire
Society I mean China's going to run in that in a huge way and so forth Japan's probably trailblazing you see a little bit with the care and robots and everything else and so um I think that um you know it's like we desperately
need the uh amplification in order to do you know not create a massive burden for our children if that Trend continues but let's say we can afford it because of something like robots or AI doesn't that in a sense make the problem worse we
feel less of an emergency so South Korea they're at 0.8 just keep the clock on ticking eventually they basically don't have people left so how can that work out well for us and the fact that someone pays the bill for our Collective extinguishing of The Human Condition uh
doesn't reassure me I think in various ways uh we can cause I I I I I don't think you know obviously you can do the math and go to diminishing zero I think we will both do we'll do various forms of incentive stimulus but other things I think we can
get it back to at least a replacement rate among other things we might say well look actually in fact being a a a parent is a paid job right just because we think that that's a an important thing as a society and we can afford
that from from you know kind of the uh the productivity increases or getting from Ai and Robotics so we use the robot Surplus in essence to pay families for that to be the second or third job in the family yes exactly yeah and politically you think that will be
super popular people hate it or I think we could get to a place where it would be popular I think right now it would be considered to be science fiction and strange um but if like a replacement rate keeps going down then I think people will say
oh no that makes sense and a lot of Science Fiction has come through yes no this reason you and I both love science fiction and trade recommendations you know on a regular basis asimov's Three Laws how good were they I think they
were really good although they were uh out of conceptualization um for a Target if I were to update them and it's a little bit like you know to to reveal my my nerdishness gift cards zeroth law um but the uh uh but I think that what you really want in it is to parallel
almost a Buddhist uh sense of the importance of life and sentience and that that's the kind of uh thing that you want in the and if you're creating really autonomous intelligences um I think the kind of the Uncle Tom if it really is a totally uh
uh autonomous being hence being careful about going into it you know uh a new form of robot slaves is is is perhaps you know not ultimately where Humanity would want to be there's not enough stress in them I think and what the robots are obliged to believe
so a robot is free to believe something crazy and then act on it yes that seems to me the biggest weakness of the laws at least to what you see in the stories yeah and hence the alignment with human interest around like how do you how do
you amplify the quality and value of life is I think a very good thing what's an underrated science fiction novel that maybe our listeners readers don't know about well there's lots um you know um another one that I've been rereading recently because I think it's it's it's
good fun but also raises good questions in a simple uh fun format is Martha Wells murderbot series I think it itself does not really address those questions very directly but it raises them in good ways like persons and being a Thing versus a person and so forth within a
kind of a classic Sci-fi romp I've been rereading Ursula Le Guin the dispossessed and I'm amazed how anti-utopian and almost right-wing it is yeah yeah utopian society is a kind of nightmare yes well and um look it's partially because we need
to have diversity in the human species like how do we that's it's part of how do we enable as much diversity while um like you know um not allowing it it's it's that the diverse of creative expression part of like like freedom of speech and why you
know it is valuable um is that diversity of of human of of craziness that also creates genius once again you've been playing more of lately and why um I haven't really had a lot of time to play games because this the the AI stuff
is occupying a total amount of time I have a stack of games without their shrink wrap taken off that I'm hoping to get to I find the AI stuff it's totally erect my calendar I had a year planned out that I could just do a whole bunch
of other things and now sort of every day you have to keep up with AI you have to learn it's like this doesn't work anymore throw up my hands and I feel a bit behind on everything uh yes although by the way there will be a chat bot for that that's good
what's a non-obvious problem we should be worrying about more well I mean I think because so much of the discourse and the Press around is around the macro things is you know AI in the hand of hands of bad human actors and there's a range of bad human actors so I think
that's uh really important I think also the question around um like people tend to go oh wait a minute the people who have the AI will be Amplified it's like how do we get that AI like the most natural thing is to pursue where the money is well how do
we get AI uh in the hands of like lower income students and school districts and all the rest to make sure that it's there and provision it's one of the things I love about open AI the accessibility of chat gbd but like how do we get as broadly and uh uh enabled
as we can as I think another important one let's say you're advising a small but Tech Advanced Nation Singapore Israel would be two options would you tell them they should build their own llms it will cost them a lot per capita
but they'll have their own llms I don't think they need to but I think they should get involved and perhaps work with the providers of llms to make sure that there are llms that fit their needs that doesn't necessarily need to
be that they need to build their own but they say hey we need to make sure that we have llm provisioning for our companies and our industry and our citizens okay let's make sure that happened whether it's the you know we spend uh billions of dollars to build
the one ourselves they could do that certainly no no no nothing bad in doing that but they should make sure that their Industries are and their citizens are provisioned but say we have a strategic petroleum Reserve For Better or Worse should Israel have a strategic
GPU Reserve don't Nations such as the U.S get too much leverage over Israel if they're dependent on us for models and right now open AI is open but open AI can't control how our government regulated our government might decide to
use it as a foreign policy tool hand it out to countries that cooperate deny it to countries that don't look I think it's uh it's an important gesture of the dependency but by the way once you have the llm um then the uh and it's you know as it
were on the soil governed by your laws the ability of the U.S to do that is much less that's the reason why it's like well some people said we need to build the computers and I do think like you know uh depth of compute is a strategic Advantage it's an important
thing to take a look at and you may want to say hey we want to make sure there's a certain amount of compute that's on Shore that that that is then aligned with our interest of our country our society our Industries Etc but also by the way if you just are that
is training and there's running and if you have the the the AI models and you're running them and you have that sufficiently within your Society your strategic dependency would be a lot less so I think you have to plot that
strategy with some care but I do think it's an important strategy to to be paying attention to and I think for example we as the US part of the thing I like about you know the kind of the the world order the US is yeah we sometimes
do stuff that throws too much stuff too much to our advantage that's a problem but we also try to provision a lot like we we um you know try to raise the rest of the world and I think we should continue to do that as you know in EU law there's a right to be forgotten
but that is arguably inconsistent with current llms you can force a new training run by saying well you've got to take me out of the current system but a new training run costs a lot of money and to have loan individuals raising their hands say oh the model has to
forget me that's just not going to work yep so legally where do you think the EU will end up on all this well I think um if the there's a smart EU dummy you and which one is up to them smarty eu's say look what we need to do is we need
to be dealing with the function of what are the kind of culture and Society so we say well we want to make sure that a that a that a um that these AI tools have the right judiciousness in being asked about individuals that's our particular
culture so we say okay you have to at least have a metabot that could interrupt the query and interrupt the query in some way and that's that's what that would be if if that was our expression of culture and being Tech forward and how you do it the
bad one is say no no you you a little bit like what the Italians were doing at Chad gbd well you can't do chapter TV he's like by the way you're disadvantaging your entire society and all of your citizens uh you're being luddites with the loom
um and the steam engine and so um you know uh be Innovative into the future yes with European values and European concerns and so forth but it's the steering into the future versus trying to encry in the past and that would be the less smart EU and you're
not sure which of those will happen I hope they pick the smart one I try as much as I can I think European uh uh values and and and insights in the future something I learned from in value I want them to contribute that positively into the future and we'll
chat GPT through vpns just dominate China at least for some number of years or will they somehow force people away from doing that that because it's you're getting Western anglosphere information all the time right including about
Tiananmen China everything else they have demonstrated with what they call the Golden Shield that they are committed to creating a alternative internet and an alternative Series so I think they will be able to do that and they even have it on the you know the
control through VPN so you know we as westerners go to China and we say hey look it looks works just fine with your ends and that's because they're not they're allowing our vpns through we're as local vpns they uh they squash them
but I've seen some numbers maybe they're not reliable but they seem to indicate there are more chat GPT users in China than in the US now they have a larger population but still that's a major effect that probably is happening now and do they just tolerate that and let
everyone query it about you know Taiwan is a country or whatever they they look in my view they should but I don't they should but what will they do and also what's more is I think they will be um because these models have less ability to put
kind of controls in them I think that will cause problems on even onshore development and they'll be open source in China right once that's more of a thing yes so they'll just lose their attempt to censor their own Society or
you think no no I will somehow triumph over everything uh a very smart and they're very committed to the censorship so I think that they will uh I think it'll create create additional problems for them in so doing but I think they'll figure out how to do
it before my last question just to repeat Reed's new book covered with gpt4 is impromptu amplifying our Humanity through AI a Wall Street Journal bestseller and finally last question read what will you do next um other than talk to dolphins um
like AI is going so fast there's a bunch of things that we didn't cover in impromptu so I actually think we will do another book and set a Content around AI um possibly within this calendar year which will be pretty amazing Reid Hoffman thank you very much thank you