Hoffman had just stepped off OpenAI’s board of directors. Hoffman traced his interest in artificial intelligence back to a conversation with Elon Musk.
“I think this kicked off, actually, in fact, with a dinner with Elon Musk years ago,” Hoffman said.
Musk told Hoffman he needed to dive into artificial intelligence during conversations about a decade ago. “This is part of how I operate,” Hoffman remembers. “Smart people from my network, tell me things and I go and do things. And so I dug into it and I’m like, ‘Oh, yes, we have another wave coming.’”
I raised the possibility that this merely suggested oligarchy control of artificial intelligence.
We also discussed Hoffman’s politics, including his thoughts on Joe Biden and “woke” politics. I asked him about the state of his friendship with fellow PayPal mafia member Peter Thiel.
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