Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio.
Speaker 2: News, which is why I'm delighted to speak to Read Hoffman,
Speaker 2: not just LinkedIn co founder and Graylock partner, but a
Speaker 2: serial entrepreneur and somebody who has founded several AI companies
Speaker 2: and will continue to do so. And what I've learned
Speaker 2: is that one hundred million US dollars is the clearing
Speaker 2: price in the market for frontier model AI talent. But
Speaker 2: we're laughing, but actually that's the debate here. Why is
Speaker 2: one hundred million dollars reasonable or unreasonable?
Speaker 1: Well, so, essentially, one of the things that's good about
Speaker 1: having an open marketplace of anything, including labor, is that
Speaker 1: you essentially get multiple bidders. And that's what's that a price.
Speaker 1: And so the fact that someone goes, I'm willing to
Speaker 1: spend one hundred million dollars in order to get this talent,
Speaker 1: you think that's crazy. Why would it possibly higher than
Speaker 1: the vast majority of CEOs of contruc Well, if that one,
Speaker 1: what you're judging is that one talent will potentially create
Speaker 1: millions of dollars of value for you, whether it's in
Speaker 1: a social network, whether it's in you know kind of uh,
Speaker 1: you know, our search engine anything else as a way
Speaker 1: of doing it. And so if you think that, then
Speaker 1: that's just a bold bet.
Speaker 2: What Sam Altman, the CEO of open ai, said was
Speaker 2: that that particular figure which he had accused Meta of
Speaker 2: offering to some open ai staff, what he claimed was
Speaker 2: it was crazy that he sounds like, it's not crazy.
Speaker 1: Really, well, I don't think it's crazy when we know
Speaker 1: that AI is going to transform all businesses in all industry,
Speaker 1: in the entire tech industry. And these are trillion dollar
Speaker 1: companies et cetera at the high end and the whole
Speaker 1: stack all the way through undown in a billion today.
Speaker 2: For a brief moment, one of them was a four
Speaker 2: trillion dollar company exactly please continue.
Speaker 1: Yes in video. And so the uh you know, so
Speaker 1: saying hey, this piece of talent is a risk adjusted
Speaker 1: bet that that makes a difference in that that's just
Speaker 1: a risk bet. You might say it's a dumb risk bet,
Speaker 1: but it's not done to do if those are the
Speaker 1: stakes you're playing for.
Speaker 2: I'm a student of Silicon Valley history. You were there
Speaker 2: with respect, and there was a time where CEOs would
Speaker 2: email each other, you know, and say, don't take my people, Okay,
Speaker 2: I won't if you don't take my people. We had
Speaker 2: this sort of poaching agreements saga in the mid to
Speaker 2: early two thousands. Is this different in this? Is it
Speaker 2: just the reality of a marketplace?
Speaker 1: Well, I think it's much. Look. I think when you
Speaker 1: email and say don't take each other people, that's bad
Speaker 1: for anti trust, that's bad for labor laws, that's bad
Speaker 1: for the right thing to do relative to talented people.
Speaker 1: And obviously, as the founder of LinkedIn, I'm kind of
Speaker 1: in the hey, we should match the talent towards best
Speaker 1: possible outcome. Now, so that was a bad thing to
Speaker 1: be doing. I'm glad we're not doing it now now.
Speaker 1: What we do still, of course want, is we want
Speaker 1: people to engage in serious work at serious companies, as
Speaker 1: opposed to like, hey, I'm being paid this much here
Speaker 1: this month and that much there this month. You've got
Speaker 1: to be like, no, no, let's get the work done. Let's
Speaker 1: build the new future. That's more of my worry on
Speaker 1: the bidding, not whatever prices it gives to.
Speaker 2: You are no longer a board participant of open Ai,
Speaker 2: so I put that out there. But you understand the
Speaker 2: company and you understand its structure. Why is this sort
Speaker 2: of restructure held up, and is that having an impact
Speaker 2: on their ability to hire or retain talent?
Speaker 1: Do you think I haven't heard that it's had an
Speaker 1: impact a negative impact on our ability had because everyone
Speaker 1: knows that Open Air is one of the amazing new
Speaker 1: tech companies of the current badge. I think that the
Speaker 1: restructure is it's a very challenging thing to kind of
Speaker 1: move from where a five oh one C three to
Speaker 1: where a public benefit corp, especially when you have lawsuits
Speaker 1: being filed and refiled and all of the sudden, you know,
Speaker 1: academics saying it's a terrible thing to happen. And so
Speaker 1: I don't know exactly what the impediments are, but it's
Speaker 1: a challenging process.
Speaker 2: If you were to guess. And again, I'm delighted to
Speaker 2: be set with you on a day where there was
Speaker 2: such newsflow Open AI and io Johnny I thing it closed.
Speaker 2: What do you suspect it is that they're building?
Speaker 1: Well, so I don't know, I'm told, but like if
Speaker 1: it were me, I build a phone.
Speaker 2: A phone because the reason I ask you the root
Speaker 2: of it is, every day, how do I interact with
Speaker 2: a generative AI tool, in particular through which is an
Speaker 2: app through my smartphone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, well exactly, No, No, a smartphone. And look,
Speaker 1: I'm you know, I'm a little older. I still use
Speaker 1: a you know, laptop every swapen.
Speaker 2: You have, as I said at the top, been a
Speaker 2: serial entrepreneur. Recently, you've also backed brain implant space. Yes,
Speaker 2: that is a somewhat crowded field. Why did you move
Speaker 2: into that area?
Speaker 1: Read Well, it's a little bit different than brain implant
Speaker 1: It's it's called SAMAI and it's ultrasound. Okay. Now, by
Speaker 1: the way, ultrasound might actually be one of the really
Speaker 1: great things for both reading and writing from the brain,
Speaker 1: because you can read but you don't have to stick
Speaker 1: things in right. And part of the reason I backed
Speaker 1: it is because they're using AI. I'm basically an AI
Speaker 1: investor to get this ultra low frequency much less energy
Speaker 1: than your phone in terms of focusing it on one
Speaker 1: part of the brain. The tool set for creating brain
Speaker 1: therapeutics on all kinds of things, anything from anxiety, this
Speaker 1: serious dementia stuff is it's an amazing possible tool set,
Speaker 1: and that possibility is the thing I invested.
Speaker 2: I found that so interesting that you moved into that field.
Speaker 2: I'm jumping around a bit that across all of this
Speaker 2: is the anxiety of jobs. Many of your peers have
Speaker 2: come out and made bold proclamations of how many jobs
Speaker 2: would be eliminated by AI. I've not had the chance
Speaker 2: yet to ask you for your prediction, and so may I.
Speaker 1: So yes, So look the far future. No one really
Speaker 1: knows anyone who says definitively there's gonna be lots of
Speaker 1: fewer jobs, or definitively if there's gonna be lots more jobs.
Speaker 1: To say that definitively is to undercut the credibility of
Speaker 1: what you're saying. Now, I describe this as the cognitive
Speaker 1: industrial Revolution. I think it has the same impact as
Speaker 1: the industrial revolution, but now in like knowledge work and
Speaker 1: information work and language work and everything, there's both the
Speaker 1: good and the bad of that. The good is none
Speaker 1: of us are of our current modern society works about
Speaker 1: the industrial revolution. That's what creates the economics and prosperity
Speaker 1: for a middle class, for democracies, for Western societies, et cetera.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, the transition is very difficult, right,
Speaker 1: So the transition into the industrial age was challenging. So
Speaker 1: I think we're both going to get the transition, which
Speaker 1: will be a lot of job transformation, initial job loss,
Speaker 1: eventually I think job regaining and transformation and ultimately a
Speaker 1: lot of prosperity.
Speaker 2: But we need to embrace let's titus all together through
Speaker 2: Reed Hoffman the investor. How have you adjusted your financial
Speaker 2: planning and investment strategy based on the talent what we discussed,
Speaker 2: but it also your jobs outlook.
Speaker 1: Well, so I'm still investing a ton in AI companies
Speaker 1: and tech companies, and for example, people forg going to say, well,
Speaker 1: you don't need fewer software engineers. And actually, in fact,
Speaker 1: I think not only are we going to we're not
Speaker 1: going to need fewer. I think we'll still have they
Speaker 1: call it ten million software engineers, developers, you know kind
Speaker 1: of uh, you know across the you know, Western world.
Speaker 1: But I think what's going to happen is actually even
Speaker 1: you are going to start doing software development because everyone's
Speaker 1: going to have a co pilot for doing some of
Speaker 1: their tasks with a software engineer helping them, right, And
Speaker 1: so we're going to have many, many more software engineers.
Speaker 2: Reid Hoffman, Greylock partner, LinkedIn, co founder, serial founder of
Speaker 2: AI companies,