Reid Hoffman on ChatGPT, Data Centers & Why America Needs AI

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_01] I personally know three people whose lives have been saved by ChatGPT.

[00:00:04] [SPEAKER_00] It's amazing that this is an industry where we have to remind ourselves that this is for human beings. Yes.

[00:00:09] [SPEAKER_01] You should never connect AI or any automated system to nuclear stuff. And you should keep the nuclear stuff disconnected from the internet, not just because of AI, but because of all the human beings. You're like, I'm a middle of the road kind of guy. Yes, I get hit by cars going both directions. I like weaving in the middle of the road.

[00:00:28] [SPEAKER_00] Eric Newcomer, welcome to the Newcomer Pod. Thrilled to have you in person. You are fresh off a Substack post laying out a sort of middle ground on artificial intelligence. And obviously there's lots to talk about there. I want to just give you a second to give the high level view. I feel like you resist. You're not claiming one of the monikers like, I'm an EA, I'm an accelerantist. Like do you have a brand for this middle of the road take?

[00:00:55] [SPEAKER_00] Or what is, would it at least give us sort of the argument behind it?

[00:00:59] [SPEAKER_01] Well, maybe a, like a smart accelerationist, a pro steering versus accelerating or deaccelerating. And, you know, generally speaking, I think I tend to think of myself as a techno humanist, which is how do you have technology enhance humanity, which is, I think, where we mostly orient towards most technology going. And we just need to keep steering in that direction.

[00:01:25] [SPEAKER_00] It's amazing that this is an industry where we have to remind ourselves that this is for human beings. Yes. It feels like that gets lost sometimes. And then there has to be sort of a corrective of, oh, who are we building this for? Not the machines themselves. What is the main thing you're calling for here? These are sort of like the data center piece of it. There's like access to AI.

[00:01:45] [SPEAKER_01] So the primary thing is kind of two things that need to go together. One, which is like, why is it important that societies, and let's talk about the US, the America needs to win at AI? Because it is the next industrial revolution. And industrial revolution is the thing that determines future prosperity, just like the previous industrial revolution did.

[00:02:11] [SPEAKER_01] So if you go, we want to opt out of the industrial revolution, that's what crushed a whole number of societies for centuries. You know, whether it's India, you know, China, a bunch of others. It's like, no, no, no, you actually have to do. So succeeding at it really matters. But then simultaneously and at the same time, more than 60% of Americans are having a very difficult time.

[00:02:36] [SPEAKER_01] Right. If, you know, there's questions around like, okay, the enormous gas price rises, the cost of beef, you know, kind of like how many jobs you need to work. And it's the responsibility of the entire American society to try to make that because, in a sense, our ethos as a society is a middle class ethos to make that work better.

[00:03:00] [SPEAKER_01] And so, and I think AI can. That doesn't mean there won't be, and this is part of the thing that was the backdrop of addressing in the essay, a lot of significant issues around work change. And people are legitimately concerned about like, well, what can you tell me about that? What's when it's going to happen? How is it going to be? And by the way, no one actually, in fact, really knows. Neither of the people who go, oh my God, it's going to be huge in a year or two. Or the people who are like, oh, no problem. Nothing this year. Actually, nobody really knows.

[00:03:30] [SPEAKER_01] And most people in the nobody really knows get nervous about that. Although that's, I think, the kind of the nobody really knows part of it is means that it's like going down a road. It's like if you're planning a highway trip, do you know there's an accident on the road already?

[00:03:45] [SPEAKER_00] Do you know that there's not usually, you know, you have the capability to navigate it. You set yourself up. This could come. This could come. I'll do that. Yes. So you don't just say I need to know everything ahead of me or I will not drive anywhere.

[00:03:57] [SPEAKER_01] Exactly. So it's kind of like, so my, my thing is get on the road and drive and keep driving. And by the way, sometimes you hit a curve or traffic, you slow down a little bit for that. But it's but it's a forward motion orientation.

[00:04:10] [SPEAKER_00] Some people think we're at the curve now, though, I guess to ask that directly, do you worry? Like, should we be pacing? Should we be halting? Or you think in terms of what you've seen, keep driving?

[00:04:21] [SPEAKER_01] So definitely keep driving. But by the way, this is the other nuance in the pacing and so forth is like, for example, there's a pacing of building and there's a pacing of deploying. And actually, I actually think when I look at like Dario's call and, you know, Sam and everyone else, I go, well, I think you probably still need to be doing the building because, by the way, in order, the problems they're worried about is you have a curse of self-improvement.

[00:04:46] [SPEAKER_01] And they've built up over the years a whole bunch of different techniques for, you know, I presume most of the people on your podcast know what alignment is, but I'll explain it very quickly, which is how do you have these things aligned to positive human outcomes? So they don't tell you how to build weapons. They, you know, generally speaking, provide you useful things in your life and not things that help you mess up other people's lives or your own.

[00:05:14] [SPEAKER_01] And the challenge in recursive self-improvement is you're essentially saying, okay, improve yourself. How do you keep that alignment as you improve yourself? And it's like, well, we don't really know how to do that. That's like, like, like we have some ideas, but if you said, guarantee me you can keep your alignment, we can't guarantee it because we don't know what that pattern is. But the problem is you won't, we won't know what the pattern of recursive self-improvement is until we start doing it. So that's why development and deploy.

[00:05:44] [SPEAKER_01] So like I tend to say, no, no, keep developing, but maybe slow down, deploy, you know, have much higher monitoring on access to the internet and some other things. And by the way, be simultaneously building AIs for measuring what the states are of these complicated RSI models, because we need to be understanding them in order to say, oh, these patterns of alignment work.

[00:06:06] [SPEAKER_01] Or by the way, if we're discovering no patterns of alignment working, well, then at that time, a real slowdown can make a difference.

[00:06:14] [SPEAKER_00] Is recursive self-improvement, sorry, development or deployment? Like you want to keep using recursive self-improvement?

[00:06:20] [SPEAKER_01] In development. Inside labs. Yes.

[00:06:23] [SPEAKER_00] But in deployment, like, okay, let's pace that. I mean, that gets to one of the issues that comes up in your essay, which is the more we say the answer to this is labs hold back what they have. You know, maybe, you know, there are a lot fewer people to get angry about it. Nobody's seen it. But it's fundamentally denying sort of those capabilities to the American public. Like part of what you're talking about is like, make sure they get actual applications that they can use. They can see the benefits of AI.

[00:06:53] [SPEAKER_00] I agree with that. But then there's also just the piece of a world where they're too tightly guarded is a world where corporations and maybe governments have this immense power that everybody else doesn't have access to. How do you balance those things?

[00:07:07] [SPEAKER_01] Well, so first in my Substack essay, one of the things that I think is critical for anyone who, and I think it's the right thing to try to help people have a positive understanding of AI. I think government should be actually helping with that. I think obviously companies desperately need to. And so it's like have a medical assistant. Like make a 24-7 medical assistant that's only available to the super wealthy right now but could be available to everybody. Legal assistant.

[00:07:34] [SPEAKER_01] Most people can't hire a lawyer to say, I'm signing this rental agreement. Like is this okay? Is it standard? Is it da-da-da? So have a legal assistant on a whole wide variety of things. Like, oh, what are my legal responsibilities if I'm driving the car? A tutor, right? So tutor for your kids, tutor for yourself. Obviously that has some play to what could have – all of that stuff should be deployed aggressively.

[00:08:00] [SPEAKER_01] And to really deploy it well, government will have to change some liability law. Like on medical, one of the things –

[00:08:08] [SPEAKER_00] I desperately want this. We could solve – not to – there's so many intertwined problems. But we live in this like surveillance state potentially that AIs can get better at creating. Like you could have like an AI sort of bill of rights where it's – you have legal protections. You're allowed to use it. You're – yes, there are cameras everywhere but this is where they're limited. Like there's a lot of issues that can be bundled into a productive conversation.

[00:08:31] [SPEAKER_01] Exactly. And by the way, the use of surveillance is frequently a sloganeering word. You know, like the – you know, like a great title called surveillance capitalism. And you're like, well, but it's not just bad. It's like, well, surveillance medicine is awesome. We do it all the time.

[00:08:47] [SPEAKER_00] And when – you know, when there is like a serial killer or a manhunt usually, people are like, how can they not find him right away? But then, you know, other times they hate sort of the dragnet. I mean, I don't think we like that we're being sort of lied to about maybe the extent of the dragnet.

[00:09:02] [SPEAKER_01] And also, by the way, it should be a highly understood environment that is legally bound to be on your side. Exactly. As a people. Right? Right. And this is one of the things like, for example, most people don't realize that London has an enormous amount of surveillance. And the Londoners are actually quite happy with it because it's like, oh, like when someone falls down with a heart attack, the ambulance arrives soon. That's good.

[00:09:28] [SPEAKER_01] Or when there is a crime, the police respond quicker. We like that because it's for us, not against us. And that's, I think, one of the really key things here. And so I think continuing to deploy carefully – actually, in my slowdown in deployment, it wasn't any of these apps. I actually even think kind of the work productivity and all the rest, I think that's part of the industrial revolution. You need to be doing it. But it's more the question of, okay, so we're making a much more intelligent AI through RSI.

[00:09:58] [SPEAKER_01] Let's make sure we understand what that intelligence is. Right? So, like, don't willy-nilly kind of just go, great, we made something super smart and now we're just throwing it out. You're like, make sure we have a good understanding that it's kind of aligned with human interest. And then – but for example –

[00:10:16] [SPEAKER_00] And there's also this risk you put it out. It's so easy to distill the models. Yes. Then someone's going to rip it off, make it open source, ungated.

[00:10:21] [SPEAKER_01] Which we've seen a bunch of. And by the way, so, like, one of the things on the open wait side, which is another frequent discussion here. Look, I was on the board of Mozilla for 11 years. I'm a massively pro-open source on all kinds of things. The open waits models, when it gets to AI, you really do have to have good answers to, like, cybersecurity and hacking. You have to have good answers to, like, you know, creation of new biological materials because of use in terrorism. Like, that's not a, oh, yeah, it's fine.

[00:10:49] [SPEAKER_01] Or, oh, you can discover those documents on Google. Because discovering the documents on Google is not the same thing of having a PhD co-collaborator that will do what you ask it to do. And it's like, okay, we should be a little bit more careful about that. Again, open is generally good, but it's an area to be careful about.

[00:11:09] [SPEAKER_00] There's so many pieces of this that I don't want to drift from earlier things, but I'm also interested in that piece of it. I mean, like, the lawyer, the medical sort of app. Just to put it directly, like, do you think people should, you know, if I talk to ChatGPT or a legal specific app, I should be able to treat that as privileged? Yes. Like, a lawyer? Like, we should. Own it privately.

[00:11:28] [SPEAKER_01] Right. And by the way, we're just fuzzy on it right now. Right. Because, by the way, you know, your email that's on the, you know, Google or Microsoft servers is privileged, and it's still in that thing. It's being handled by software, et cetera. Like, that's already there. There's no reason that a interaction with an agent should be treated any differently, right?

[00:11:54] [SPEAKER_01] From a privilege, you know, standpoint, whether it's legal, medical, et cetera. And it's really just people's...

[00:12:01] [SPEAKER_00] But if I write down, I guess there's one, it's like, I'm using it as a tool to talk to lawyers. Yes. But there's another where it's like, obviously, if I wrote a Word document with, like, my confession and they found it on my computer, they'd use that against me. Yes. But if I'm, like, in Chachibiti and I'm asking it, like, I think I was speeding, like, I don't know. Like, do you think we should have protections there that it's like a therapist or as long as I'm not, like, actively saying I'm murdering that person? Yeah.

[00:12:30] [SPEAKER_01] Look, I think broadly, yes. Although also maybe with, like, one of the things I think, it kind of gets down to kind of how you do a terms of service. I would ideally, I think, have a terms of service that if someone's, like, speeding, et cetera, that should be within the personal. If it's like, how do I make a new biological terror weapon? No, not so much. Right. Right.

[00:12:57] [SPEAKER_01] So it's probably a question of where the boundary should be. But, like, for example, because if you think about this is we're a far healthier society if everybody has the advice of some legal counsel and it's very difficult to afford. Right. Having at least an ability to have a interaction for can you proxy legal counsel for me. Exactly. Is, I think, a very good feature to have.

[00:13:26] [SPEAKER_01] That's what I was essentially gesturing at earlier.

[00:13:29] [SPEAKER_00] Well, you know, to bring a lot, it's like, I certainly don't support people attacking flock cameras. But you can imagine a world today. It's like the government has all these tools to come after somebody with flock cameras who's, like, destroying them. And somebody goes to ChatGPT and says, I've done this. Like, what, you know, maybe it needs to be a legal specific app because the problem is lawyers can get in trouble if they give you advice of abetting a crime versus here's the legal advice I can give you around a potential crime or something.

[00:13:58] [SPEAKER_00] But, yeah, do you think, like, there needs to be some framework where we have talking to a model for legal advice as if it was talking to a lawyer?

[00:14:06] [SPEAKER_01] I think that's essentially correct. And actually, by the way, you might do, if you might say in that mode, like, the model only talks legal. Like, so you can't go- You have to switch into it. Yes. And, like, for example, it's like, well, you know, I'd like to figure out how to break into this building and maybe the model can help me. Well, a lawyer won't do that. So if you're talking on legal mode, it was like, no, my legal advice to you is don't break into the building.

[00:14:35] [SPEAKER_00] Exactly. Right. And on the medical front, do you think we need new policy in the same way?

[00:14:41] [SPEAKER_01] At the minimum from legal liability. One of the things that I've been trying to advocate for a number of years, and it's part of the reason I've been doing it to governments and a bunch of other folks, and now I'm just kind of thinking, okay, let me just start saying this. Just shout about it loudly enough and hope the culture takes it on. Yes, exactly.

[00:14:56] [SPEAKER_01] Exactly. Because if we shift, part of the reason why most people are not aware that you can actually get pretty good medical advice from Chet, GBD, and Claude, and the reason is they don't advertise it and they lightly steer away from it to try to avoid medical liability.

[00:15:12] [SPEAKER_00] Because if they shout, they say we can do it, then they can get sued and they fail.

[00:15:16] [SPEAKER_01] Exactly. And what you want to do is say, okay, government should say, look, if you follow the following things, then you have essentially a kind of a safe harbor from medical liability. So that, and by the way, so like the kind of things I think you would do is you'd say, the app has to be free. The data has to be entirely their own individuals. You have to not sell the data to anybody.

[00:15:44] [SPEAKER_01] You have to fundamentally ask, do you have access to a doctor? Do you have access to, you know, kind of like medical facilities and so forth? And then when you're giving advice, you should say, look, it's still far better if you can consult a doctor, but if you can't, you know, like timing, availability, et cetera, here's what I would think. Right. You know, kind of thing.

[00:16:10] [SPEAKER_01] And if you had that, at least three companies would go provide that. It would cost the government nothing. But, and they would advertise that they would have it because it would be like, look, this is a really useful feature. And by the way, it is a really useful feature. And here's how useful the feature is today. I personally know three people whose lives have been saved by ChatGPT by using it as a second opinion. Right. So like, like in a hospital and they go, I'm not sure. And they go, go to another hospital and that got in that hospital.

[00:16:40] [SPEAKER_01] And it was like, well, if you'd arrived here about an hour and a half later, you'd be dead. Right. Right. You know, that kind of thing. And that's, we want that for everyone. Right. And that's easy enough to do. Now, of course, lawyers will argue, no, no, no, no, no. We need to have medical tort. It's the only way to keep it. And it's like, well, just, just describe what the guidelines are for what you, where you have to stay in. And if you think, oh, that's a little borderline, then bring in the guideline a little bit.

[00:17:06] [SPEAKER_01] It's like only with it, like you, part of the medical assistant could be the, I'm sorry, I'm not allowed to give advice on that topic. Right. Right. You know, please find someone to consult with. If you want, I can pull up a list of public, you know, like potentially publicly available resources that you might be able to use.

[00:17:23] [SPEAKER_00] It's a really interesting point on the why don't OpenAI, Anthropic, et cetera, do a better job of taking credit for the good things they can do. It's like, here's a case where maybe they're afraid that they'll get sued if they brag about it. They for sure will be. Interesting. Right. And it seems, I mean, it's clearly a good that you can, you know, put your medical documents into, just get a different opinion. Like if it disagrees with your doctor. Yeah. Sort of ask questions. That's great.

[00:17:50] [SPEAKER_01] And also, by the way, like another thing is, literally for people who have high-end concierge doctors, they put their blood work into ChatGPT and Claude. And then you can talk to the agent for two hours about like, well, what does this mean? And how many people have this? And, you know, does this mean that I have the following condition? What would be the probability? How else would I measure it? Should I take the blood test again? Doctors don't have time for that. AI has all the time in the world.

[00:18:18] [SPEAKER_00] And sometimes they give simplistic answers, assuming you might not. Do, take the medicine or you might not do X, Y, Z. And if you have someone actually taking the time to explain, it's like, oh, they're giving you that direct advice because it would take a lot of work to do the perfect solution or whatever. Yes. Can be helpful to have the time to get a real answer.

[00:18:38] [SPEAKER_01] Well, this is the thing where it's like going through in depth and understanding. Like another thing that AI is used for. So say, for example, this is a couple of years ago. I was like, I want to understand quantum mechanics better. So I took a set of quantum mechanics challenges and I went, okay, explain this to me like I'm 12. Okay, I got that. Explain it to me like I'm 18. Okay, I got that. Explain it to me like I'm a physics college student. Okay, got that. Okay, explain it to me like a professor. Okay, I don't got that, but I now understand what the arc looks like.

[00:19:07] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. We need to win in AI because it's the next industrial revolution. And if you don't win that type of revolution, you're sort of irrelevant as a society. You don't get to make the big decisions of the big global decisions. Your children are poor. It's sort of a dark world that we have to remind people of that in a certain way. It's like we still as Americans should think we should win. Like obviously we've made mistakes as a culture. We're not perfect. We need to fix it.

[00:19:34] [SPEAKER_00] But it is somewhat worrying that we're in a society today where it feels like we need to even make the case. It's like good to stay on top. Yes. But do you feel like there's a substantial part of, I guess, like the political system that doesn't believe that? And I guess a lot of people would say it's clear, you know, I'm Democratic line. You're a big Democratic donor. Like I think we're shared sympathies there. But the party most likely to say, oh, maybe we shouldn't be on top. It is the Democrats.

[00:20:04] [SPEAKER_00] And does that worry you?

[00:20:05] [SPEAKER_01] Well, it bothers me. And part of the reason I wrote the piece was to try to show Democrats how they can have a pro-AI vision. Because the answer is to say, look, part of I think what the Democrats most naturally identify with is the people who are disadvantaged in society. They may be poor. They may be racial biases. They may be other things. And they say, we're about trying to make sure like the rich and the powerful elites don't grind them down.

[00:20:33] [SPEAKER_01] And that's a good sympathy because we should bring everyone along. And so they tend to think, ah, this is just, you know, you tech people saying how you want to get more wealthy and competing with people. And it's not about all these other people. And it's like, look, and by the way, that has happened at points in history, whether it's tech, oil, finance, et cetera. It's like, so it's a good voice to be saying, that's great. You're going to win in the industry. And that'll bring prosperity in the country. Make sure it's helping the country.

[00:21:01] [SPEAKER_01] And as an example that I use to try to wake up Democrats on this topic, say, well, would you like to have a return to manufacturing industry in this country? And the answer is yes, because I saw the middle class. AI and robotics is your only play, right? You should be leaning into that. So as opposed to saying AI bad, stop AI. It's like, well, hey, can you AI guys be making sure that our whole manufacturing industry is well provisioned with the stuff that's happening? Could you make sure you're investing in that?

[00:21:29] [SPEAKER_01] And if you're doing that, we will be more sympathetic. We still will be watching out for, hey, don't be doing, you know, like harming children and other kinds of things because it's really important. But like we'll be more sympathetic to, oh, we'll help you like figure out where you can find a community that should buy into your data center deal because like in building the data center for doing the community because you're helping the communities with manufacturing jobs, right? That kind of thing would be good.

[00:21:58] [SPEAKER_01] And that's the kind of thing to think of for them to think about. Now, it's absolutely right that because they tend to be the like we're on the side of the disempowered person against the wealthy and powerful, large companies, et cetera, et cetera. They tend to do that as a dynamic, but that's a destroyer future, destroy children's future, et cetera. And it's like, don't do that.

[00:22:22] [SPEAKER_00] I hate to be the why doesn't the public appreciate tech more person. But I mean, right now the deal with AI is that, you know, tech companies are way, they're burning through investors capital very aggressively, spending tons of money building in America, like the capacity to do this, giving these apps away mostly for free and giving access to it. And yeah, Americans poll very negatively on AI, yet use it.

[00:22:51] [SPEAKER_00] I feel like something that's been coming up a lot, I guess, on this podcast and in my work is this conflict between sort of tech industry sort of saying revealed preferences are who you are. I was talking to like Simile, which is doing simulations of the future. And it's like people are really what they do in some ways. And then there's sort of, I don't know, the media class world, which is like people are what they say and they say negative things and they both to pollsters and, you know, wine online.

[00:23:20] [SPEAKER_00] I don't know what do you make of the disconnect between obviously what people are doing, which is using these tools and embracing them versus what they appear to be saying.

[00:23:30] [SPEAKER_01] Well, so there's a couple different sorts of using the tools. So one is sometimes people using them don't realize they're using them. They don't know what that's. Yes, exactly. And then two is they're using it, but they're kind of using it for, oh, like where is that cafe in Midtown that I wanted to find and so forth. And then they're simultaneously being told, oh, the people who are building this think there's an extinction risk in humanity or it's going to take out 25% of white collar jobs in a couple of years. And like, well, why are you doing that?

[00:23:59] [SPEAKER_01] But like, like, are you crazy? And they think, oh, you must not be crazy. Is it just because you're going to get really wealthy? Like, why are you like? And so so they can simultaneously have this negative feel. It's a little bit like I got asked by a friend of mine. He's like, well, why are the college students booing AI and commencement speeches? Because they're all using it a lot. It's like, look, here's the thing.

[00:24:22] [SPEAKER_00] Knowing your friends, they were probably drafting their commencement speech.

[00:24:24] [SPEAKER_01] You're like, how do I avoid this problem? Yes, exactly. And I was like, look, to your average college student, from what they're being told, they're like, okay, you gave me a homework helper and you took away my career. Take your homework helper back and give me my career back. Right. Like, and that's incorrect as a framing.

[00:24:43] [SPEAKER_01] But if that's what the the the the kind of the the the words that you're being told are, then naturally you have a very negative verse reaction, even though probably the vast majority, like 99 percent of college students use AI regularly.

[00:25:00] [SPEAKER_00] Do you have a prediction on what sort of AI is going to mean for jobs over the next decade?

[00:25:07] [SPEAKER_01] Well, anyone who has a solid prediction is probably self delusional, because one of the things is a little bit like getting on the road and steering is there's a lot of different ways it can play out. And I've heard smart people argue everything from, you know, the Dario, 25 percent white collar bloodbath to there's going to be zero issue whatsoever. Right. Like it'll be the most empowering thing and people use it and so on. And and smart people on like. So the whole range is smart.

[00:25:35] [SPEAKER_01] So the way that I tend to think about it is what here's kind of the more crisp thing. So one is the the speed at which existing companies will change is not nearly as fast as a technologist think, because how companies learn things like, for example, if you go to most companies now, like, well, we're looking around to buy an AI class. And you're like, you know, we got to train our employees, we got to buy an AI class. You're like, no, you could just use the AI for that. Ask the AI how to use the AI. That's the whole point. Yes.

[00:26:05] [SPEAKER_01] You don't like you don't need to go like AI for dummies. No one should buy that book. You just like, you know, don't do that. On the other hand, so those will be much slower than most of the oh, my God, it's going to be here in a year or two. But what will happen is new kinds of companies will be created that are much more AI native, and those will be very strong competitors. And then that will start forcing the competition.

[00:26:32] [SPEAKER_01] And so that's the pattern that once we're in it, I think we can make predictions about, well, how will the major employment white collar jobs, whether they're sales or customer service, other kinds of, what do those, how do those end up, you know, transforming?

[00:26:51] [SPEAKER_00] How quickly are AI native companies out competing the old guard? Rather than the old guard being like, goodbye, everybody. We figured out how to use AI.

[00:26:58] [SPEAKER_01] Exactly. Exactly. And by the way, that will then cause the old guard to start adjusting. And it will be some of them will fail. Some of them will succeed. And there'll be this kind of really kind of intense period on that. And in that job transformation, I think that will be hard. And I think one of the things that, you know, I've also been thinking about is like, how do we create the right AI tools to help everyone in society with that?

[00:27:23] [SPEAKER_01] How do you help them figure out like what other kinds of work might be possible or how to adjust like, oh, well, this is what the new kind of salesperson looks like in an AI universe. How to learn that job, how to do that job, how to find that job, you know, all of that stuff. This is one of the broad things that people really need to understand is you want your solution to have the same characteristics as the problem, namely in scale, cost, speed. You want to have an impedance match.

[00:27:52] [SPEAKER_01] And so a lot of the times people say, oh, we're going to have a jobs issue. We'll have community colleges do it. And you're like, that does not have an impedance match. Like, sure, do something, no harm in doing something, but it will not survive at that, right? So how do we have AI be on the help side of the bar, which is totally doable? That's the thing we should be pushing for. That's the thing that I was like when I talked to any government officials, not just Democrats.

[00:28:21] [SPEAKER_00] It's help guide you towards a job. It's help teach people how to build businesses alongside of it. I'm a small business owner. We use it to build our ticketing platform. We're going to do an exciting report soon that we would have never been able to just sort of like format and build a website and password protect it the same way without AI. So I can see it. But is that the path? It's like everybody's a small business owner?

[00:28:44] [SPEAKER_01] Well, I think you'll have a lot of entrepreneurship. I think you'll have a lot of small business entrepreneurship. I think you'll have new entrepreneurship building new companies. And I think you'll have a, for example, like some of it is like, how would I pitch myself as a college student saying, why do you desperately need me at your company? It's like, I'm AI native. You need to be learning AI native. You need to hire people like me. And by the way, most businesses are like, oh yeah. We know that we need to. And if they're convinced, then sure.

[00:29:11] [SPEAKER_01] We have entry level hiring despite, you know, trade war and Iranian war and oil prices and all the rest, which is a lot of the reason why everyone's much more cautious in hiring and business.

[00:29:21] [SPEAKER_00] You were saying before we came on, I don't think we've hit on this yet. Just without sort of the AI sort of explosion, our economy would be in a pretty dark place. Can you paint a picture of that? And like, yeah. And what are the political consequences of that as well?

[00:29:38] [SPEAKER_01] And so this is a particular one in which, you know, call it progressive Democrats really don't understand, which is our economy. You know, we have a serious problem problems with our economy. And it's not just because of massive, you know, deficit and debt that a huge amount of our taxes go to just literally pay the interest on the debt. It's like we've maxed out like all of our credit cards kind of national debt. But all of this capital infusion, people think, oh, they're just going to the tech companies.

[00:30:08] [SPEAKER_01] Like, no, no, like a massive, like, like, actually, I should go try to measure the exact percentage. But a massive percentage of it is going towards data center construction, which means construction, electricians, carpenters, real estate development, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:30:26] [SPEAKER_01] You know, legal work around what's going on, community service engagement, like just a ton of and literally I've seen, you know, place of people who are texting going, hey, this AI thing is essential for me looking after my family and so forth. And so that capital is the only reason we're not in a recession. Right. So and by the way, most of that capital doesn't go to the cities. And, you know, there's a natural reason why capital tends to aggregate and the network affects the cities.

[00:30:54] [SPEAKER_01] Most of that's more distributed across the country. That's great.

[00:30:58] [SPEAKER_00] On the data center freeze, like how likely is it that there is one? Like, are you worried about that? I mean, and certainly you have, you know, the Bernie Sanders of the world there. On the one hand, there's this bipartisan sort of support for it. On both ends of the spectrum, you see Republicans even sort of paying some lip service to it. On the other hand, it feels sort of implausible. It's so key to America's main business right now. It's good money. It doesn't have to come to your community. It can come to another.

[00:31:28] [SPEAKER_00] How much are you actually worried that there will be a freeze?

[00:31:33] [SPEAKER_01] Well, we're capable, given the broadsbed, you know, kind of like a lot of misinterpretation of AI and data centers. We're capable of doing.

[00:31:44] [SPEAKER_00] Humans are good at getting to panic. Yes. We can talk ourselves into it if we want to do it.

[00:31:48] [SPEAKER_01] And so, for example, like everyone keeps saying water in data centers, even though that paper was retracted for its inaccuracies. And so, I ultimately am enough of an optimist. I don't think we'll have the shoot ourselves, you know, in both legs, you know, kind of like a national moratorium, et cetera. What I do think we should be doing, I think Josh Shapiro at Pennsylvania is doing a very good job of this, is to say, hey, make sure the local community is bought in.

[00:32:17] [SPEAKER_01] Make sure the local community is getting sustaining benefit from it. Make sure the, like, noise and environment and everything else as well take care of. Make sure that electricity prices either stay the same or go down as a function of the provisioning of this. And then allow the local community to say, I want it, I don't want it, and say, you know, like, self-determination.

[00:32:39] [SPEAKER_01] It's one of the great things that we think about a kind of American, you know, kind of the history of American culture, even back to, you know, the American Revolution. So, allow the local communities to do that. And then have, like, the state and federal involved just to make sure, like, the environmental stuff and make sure that there's no, like, oh, they're bribing a local official or something. But it's actually, it makes sense.

[00:33:03] [SPEAKER_00] Let different communities decide what's right from them. Is there any way to make them more aesthetically appealing? Or they're not the most beautiful seeming things?

[00:33:14] [SPEAKER_01] It's probably that, but, you know, given that economics is always about a question of limited, I-

[00:33:22] [SPEAKER_00] Why spend the money on that?

[00:33:23] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, I would, like, make it, like, definitely make it not have sound noise issues, because that can be very disruptive to a local community. But if you said, hey, we've got a spare X dollars, I'd rather spend the spare X dollars in creating local economy, right? And I'm saying make sure that that's invested in making the community more prosperous.

[00:33:43] [SPEAKER_00] Right. You know, one thing that I feel like Silicon Valley used to be the leader on was this talk of, like, UBI, universal basic income. And there's still some echoes of it, which is, you know, there's gonna be so much AI abundance. We have to give everyone some sort of, like, minimum protection. On the other hand, you know, I don't read as certainly sort of the conservatives in Silicon Valley as supportive of, like, expand Social Security or, you know, any sort of, like, practical expansion of the safety net given sort of imminent AI abundance.

[00:34:12] [SPEAKER_00] I guess the first question is just, like, what do you actually believe? You've already brought up the deficit. Is it like, oh, we need to cut the deficit so we can't expand the safety net? There is some abundance coming, so we should expand on that basis. Or what's your view on safety net expansion?

[00:34:28] [SPEAKER_01] So, broadly speaking, I think that as societies make progress, part of your progress in society is you expand your human rights, you expand your safety net. I think it's a good thing that you do as you progress in society. Like, you'll say, well, you know, of course you should have, you know, kind of a lot of unemployment insurance. Like, well, but that was a relatively newish thing, right?

[00:34:52] [SPEAKER_01] Like, it's good to be doing this, to have a much more human society and a functional society. Now, that being said, I was never a huge fan of either UBI or the articulation of UBI, universal basic income, because, one, you do the math.

[00:35:11] [SPEAKER_00] Right, and that's why I sort of pivoted. I brought up UBI and I talked about social security, so yes.

[00:35:16] [SPEAKER_01] But you do the math and you're like, the math doesn't work. Like, this isn't complicated math. It just doesn't work for a very – You have to be so present with massive, massive abundance this year when you're paying the bills in order to do that. So it kind of like – it just doesn't make sense. And I think it's the crazy – the people who think, oh, the whole world will change next year. And you're like, yeah, it's not going to do that. So that kind of thing.

[00:35:40] [SPEAKER_01] So I think expanding safety – and I also think that the – in part, what I'd want to be doing is saying, hey, look, if we're going to be creating a whole bunch of massively profitable companies because AI helps make them profitable, we need to make sure that the profitability of those companies is then reflected into the investment in society to make sure that we continue to have kind of our American way of life and so forth.

[00:36:03] [SPEAKER_01] And I don't think the way to do that – one of the reasons why a lot of Americans hated the UBI thing is they don't love the idea of I'm going to put you out of work and I'm going to put you on welfare. Like, no, no, no. I work. I mean. So creating things that involve – I'm doing things that are meaningful. I'm participating. I'm contributing to the world. I'm providing for my family. That's where the money should be wrapping into. And I think there's a number of different ways to do that.

[00:36:26] [SPEAKER_01] But if we get very profitable companies, if they're American companies, we can then say, okay, we need to use this economics to help the rest of the folks.

[00:36:34] [SPEAKER_00] Do you think it's fundamentally philanthropy or – like, when do we get – again, I feel like the AI world can have this sort of like, everybody's going to be an artist. Or like, even sort of right-coded people will say, like, do something productive and, like, that'll be good enough. But it's just like – or I think I'm reflecting Vinod at the moment. But it's like, where is the money coming for that? And are we about to see these sort of like violin grants or whatever? How do people actually get paid to be productive but not in an economically productive way?

[00:37:03] [SPEAKER_01] So what we don't know is what is the AI productivity of companies mean? Now, say, for example, one universe is there's a ton more small firms that are all operating at high function and the AI thing helps them function. Then it takes care of itself, right? So, like, that's one kind of, you know, positive, positive outcome that you don't have to then go lean in a whole bunch of extra weight in order to make it happen.

[00:37:31] [SPEAKER_01] Say, for example, you say, well, there isn't a massive number of employment opportunities. There is a few and the companies are mostly only using AI and they're generating a whole bunch of economics. Well, then you say, okay, we have to tax them to have it, I think, broadly, you'd want to put it – I don't know about cultural grants. That's fine. I mean, we obviously have that work with science and arts and cultures and everything else.

[00:38:00] [SPEAKER_01] And maybe there's ways to improve that and do that. But I would kind of say invest in the local communities. Like, for example, people might say, hey, I've got an idea about things we should be doing in terms of community centers or events, that kind of stuff. And I want to be putting money into that. I want to be doing construction on that, et cetera. And, like, there's all these kinds of things, ways to do. And so I think this is a little bit of the how do we know this thing that's far down the road and like pioneering where we've never – no one's ever gone.

[00:38:29] [SPEAKER_01] There's a lot of different possibilities. And what we need to be doing is driving down the road with the questions in our mind but not cemented answers.

[00:38:37] [SPEAKER_00] Right. On the deficit – like, are you somebody who thinks AI is about to increase, like, GDP growth and change our productivity? Like, do you think they're – are you betting on a world where we sort of outrun our problems? Or you think something needs to be done to the debt or that shouldn't be a priority?

[00:38:56] [SPEAKER_01] Well, I generally think it's crazy the level of debt we have. And we get to that debt through all kinds of things. Like, both Democrats and Republicans just keep increasing military spending. And it isn't just because of getting into, you know, needless, very destructive wars like Iran. And so on, the question around what should we do in order to have economic generativity is really important.

[00:39:24] [SPEAKER_01] I don't think we can austerity our way out of the debt. I think we have to grow. Now, that doesn't mean, oh, have as much debt as you like. You want to double the debt? You know, like, it's terrible economics. Anyone who runs a business knows that doesn't really work. Once you say we don't care about costs, everything goes crazy. Yes, exactly. And that's one of the things that makes business such an important part of modern society everywhere in the world. Because, like, no, no, you're focused on cost to benefit.

[00:39:52] [SPEAKER_01] And you try to trim out bad costs and so on. And that's one of the reasons why, you know, governments, which don't tend to have the same guidance, you know, kind of – because government in every country is a monopoly, tends to just take money. It's like, no, no, you need to be refactoring costs. And I think that's a very good thing. But the only way forward is to grow the economy.

[00:40:17] [SPEAKER_01] And so you got to, like – like, part of what I, you know, tell a lot of Democrats who may not understand this as well is growing the economy is the only way you achieve the social mission that you want to achieve.

[00:40:28] [SPEAKER_00] Do you want the Democrats to spend a lot of time digging into correcting, like, the sort of illegal activity of this administration? Or, you know, if they're about to hopefully maybe gain power in the midterms or – and then there's going to be a presidential race. Like, I don't know. You know, I think I'm more on the side of, like, man, like, Trump coin, all this stuff.

[00:40:49] [SPEAKER_00] Like, one way to animate society around fighting corruption is to have this specific story of how Trump abused, you know, office and was able to sort of enrich himself. And if we go after those things, it can also be paired with stuff for broader societal corrections. Do you agree with that strategy? Or do you think, man, we're going to have to at some point look forward and try not to overly obsess on what Trump is doing?

[00:41:16] [SPEAKER_01] Well, you definitely have to look forward fundamentally, right? Like, we're trying to build a future for our children and so on. And I do think some awareness of how much grift amongst the griftocracy there has been is worth understanding so that people understand that's an important issue for the health of society.

[00:41:36] [SPEAKER_00] It's terrible for American business, right? I mean, if you create a culture where just being close to the president is self-enriching, I mean, it's very demotivating.

[00:41:44] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Well, and also, it's precisely what makes a bunch of other – like, it takes us to the bad excesses of South America. It's like, no, no, that's precisely why we've had prosperity is because we've had anti-corruption. We've had rule of law. We've had a pro-business environment. And I think that everything from, obviously, Trump coin, there's also, I think, Trump has done more stock trading than all of –

[00:42:10] [SPEAKER_00] He's literally selling the ability to front run his tweets on social. Yes.

[00:42:15] [SPEAKER_01] And it's just literally anti-business, right? I mean, it's terrible. And so I think that's important to correct. I do think that there will be a lot of emotional kind of instinct to say we should go get belated justice on all fronts in this.

[00:42:35] [SPEAKER_01] And it's like, look, there's been so much you could spend years just trying to see justice for every single part of rampant corruption and abuse of power. You want to select some just to be – and then you want to build the future.

[00:42:55] [SPEAKER_00] Man, we need to figure out a way to have the legal system move more quickly. And I don't know. It's just – it's so slow that, you know, yeah, then it can jam up sort of everything else that's going on.

[00:43:09] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. And by the way, legal system working potentially more effectively, AI can be good with that. Right.

[00:43:16] [SPEAKER_00] Exactly. Well, yeah. What is – I haven't asked you, what is your P-doom?

[00:43:21] [SPEAKER_01] Oh, funny. Does your audience know what P-doom is? I think so. Okay.

[00:43:25] [SPEAKER_00] This is the – P-doom, we're talking like extinction level risk here.

[00:43:30] [SPEAKER_01] I haven't quantified a number ever really. And the reason is because I think that people tend to like go – it tends to be an agitation, like my internal agitation. I give you a number off it. But let me tell you a little bit about kind of where I think people mistake existential risk. So they tend to go – like a very classic argument is does the development of AI and potential killer robots add an existential risk? And you say yes. And then it says, see, you should stop.

[00:43:59] [SPEAKER_01] You're adding an existential risk. It doesn't matter if your P-doom is 0.0001 or it's 2% or whatever. It doesn't matter because you're adding something and you should stop. It's like, well, the right way to look at human existential risk is a portfolio. It isn't just robots. It's bio and pandemics. It's asteroids. It's nucleus.

[00:44:20] [SPEAKER_00] And living in the status quo. Oh, interesting. We have existing existential risk.

[00:44:24] [SPEAKER_01] So there's a whole portfolio. So then the question with AI becomes, does it increase or decrease the portfolio, the entire thing, right? And sure, there is an irreducible add of mistakenly or deliberately you create some killer robots, right, that have a like extinction level impact. By the way, cyber attack robots aren't really that.

[00:44:54] [SPEAKER_01] I mean, there's like, oh, it's cyber, the hugging face thing, P-doom. And you're like, those have like, that's not existential, right? Yes, it's a problem. But by the way, that hack could have been done by humans and is done by humans frequently. People don't realize how many cyber hacks are happening all the time with humans.

[00:45:10] [SPEAKER_00] And obviously, you know, in the worst case scenario, like I get that cyber connects to like, you know, missile silos or whatever. But there's like, it feels like there's a little bit of like the internet could go offline or something. It's like, that is not existential. I mean, it is bad. And certainly it would wreck my business. It would be very hard. I'm not minimizing how important the internet is, but it is not existential.

[00:45:30] [SPEAKER_01] So that's the reason why I tend to avoid the P-doom conversation because it's like, look, what you should really be doing is thinking about like, okay, so how does AI reduce bio risk? How does AI reduce asteroid risk? And by the way, you should never connect AI or any automated system to nuclear stuff. And you should keep the nuclear stuff disconnected from the internet, not just because of AI, but because of all the human beings.

[00:45:56] [SPEAKER_01] Like, yes, treat existential risk as a portfolio and be turning it down. But like a natural pandemic could be an existential risk. So it isn't that human beings are the only ones. But by the way, of course, human beings doing things tend to be most of the existential risk.

[00:46:17] [SPEAKER_00] I know. It's amazing to talk about this new existential risk. It's like we still have nukes around. And we're just sort of like, all right, we've got used to it. We're not so worried about it. But I certainly would risk like pure nukes outside of AI sending them as more risky probably than AI development in my own calculus. Are you, we're getting towards the end, but the, I mean, one of the things that AI could create is this sort of like abundance, abundant lifespans.

[00:46:45] [SPEAKER_00] Like, are you optimistic that we're going to significantly extend human life? And is that a priority for you? Or you think there will be just, we'll conclude there are sort of natural limits?

[00:46:57] [SPEAKER_01] So not surprising. You know me well. The answer is to some degree, both. You're like, I'm a middle of the road kind of guy. Yes. I get hit by cars going both directions. I like weaving in the middle of the road. But the, so we will be extending lifespan. And not just like a lot of the progress in the last few decades have been massive reduction of child mortality. And that is part of what drives up the average.

[00:47:19] [SPEAKER_01] But I think we will also be figuring out how to say, hey, getting to 100 in a fastable way is like an achievable thing as a kind of increasing the kind of average. And I think we'll do that. I think it's a good thing to do. On the other hand, like what most people don't realize is that our, like every single human being when they're born is dying of cancer. Right? Like because we're this homeostatic balance system which eventually gets out of balance.

[00:47:49] [SPEAKER_01] And so the ability to say, no, no, we'll be able to really massively rebalance it seems unlikely given the nature of where we are. And it reminds me of like one of my kind of favorite Buddhism jokes is, you know, why did the Buddhist coroner get fired? And the answer is kept marking as cause of death birth. Right? So, you know, and it's like, look, it's good to live longer, more fruitful lives. It's a good effort. We've been doing it on a lot of things.

[00:48:19] [SPEAKER_01] Child mortality, you know, the Gates Foundation, very, very good thing to be continuing to focus on. But I think we will make progress. We just won't make progress. Like in Silicon Valley, you listen to, we're turning off the death gene. Oh, you mean the one that stops cancer?

[00:48:34] [SPEAKER_00] Are there projects that you think are most likely to sort of make a difference in the near term? Is this an area you invest a lot in?

[00:48:40] [SPEAKER_01] I don't invest a lot in it. I mean, I obviously co-founded Monas AI here with Siddhartha Mukherjee and Ujjal saying to try to cure cancer because cancer is a killer.

[00:48:48] [SPEAKER_00] It's something you spend a lot of time on. Yes.

[00:48:50] [SPEAKER_01] So there is a bunch of stuff. And I helped stand up the biohub for CZI. I'm on the board of ARC Institute with the Colisons and Patrick and Savannah. So I try to do stuff for the kind of bio for humanity on this. So I put time and energy into it. Probably I've only done two or three investments of which Monas is the most significant.

[00:49:12] [SPEAKER_00] And so do you have a sort of cancer elimination timeline? I know we always want.

[00:49:17] [SPEAKER_01] Well, AI is the best shot we've had in human history to do this. And a little bit of, you know, there's a bunch of variables you don't know of, like, because you try to tackle the major ones early. I doubt you'll ever fully get rid of cancer. And by the way, it's kind of this question of, well, you get rid of that one. Oh, and then this one will happen. So there's probably as you get rid of the major ones and get to more of a long tail, you then start having to do things.

[00:49:46] [SPEAKER_01] Because people don't realize there's thousands of cancers. Right. There's lots and lots of different kinds of cancer.

[00:49:50] [SPEAKER_00] If you're one, you have time now to get everything else. Yes. But do you think we haven't, I mean, we haven't had a first one yet. Do you think?

[00:49:58] [SPEAKER_01] No. Well, and that's, you know, we're very ambitious at Monas. We hope. We're discovering some really interesting chemistry.

[00:50:06] [SPEAKER_00] Right. I mean, if you had to sort of leave us with what you think sort of a realistic message for, you know, the Democrats and sort of, I don't know, the set of the AI world that really wants to feel like they're bringing every American along. And not sort of like, oh, they need to sort of figure it out. It's like, you know, take advantage of this moment or miss out.

[00:50:29] [SPEAKER_00] If, you know, you can extend sort of empathy to people who aren't necessarily going to easily sort of figure out how to play this huge innovation. Like what is the message?

[00:50:40] [SPEAKER_01] So I think the message is, first, for everyone who is trying to help people get, be ideating and incenting and getting as much AI help for the majority of society. Right. Whether it's medical assistant, legal assistant, tutor. Or you can also imagine government services working a whole lot easier. Say you didn't have to go down to DMV hell. I mean, most of the jokes in Hollywood are, you know, you want to visit hell on earth, go to the DMV.

[00:51:10] [SPEAKER_01] You know, all of this kind of stuff. You can imagine financial advice that would be very helpful. Like just tons of, like just do all that. But by the way, that doesn't mean like don't also try to help with jobs and work and so forth. And I've been, you know, thinking about like, okay, should I do another version of the startup of you for like kind of entrepreneurs and the AI community, you know, kind of AI age?

[00:51:34] [SPEAKER_01] Like so, but the short answer is give people as much knowledge and perspective and bridges to hope as you can. And don't kind of be Pollyannish. I don't like the, oh, it'll be fine. It's like, no, no. Journeys can be difficult. But the journey is not only worth it to you, it's also worth it to your children. It's worth it to your community. And, you know, I, one of the things I love about America is we reinvent ourselves.

[00:52:01] [SPEAKER_01] And I think that this, like that, that gives us a very good position for kind of making this, you know, call it American intelligence out of artificial intelligence.

[00:52:11] [SPEAKER_00] Great Hoffman. Thank you so much for coming on the Newcomer Pod. That's our episode. This is the Newcomer Pod. Thanks for listening. Please like, comment, subscribe. Go find us on our sub stack at newcomer.co. If you're hungry for more podcasting, I also have a talk show called the Cerebral Valley Show. We love your comments. Thanks for all your support and see you next week.