Scan a few headlines and you’ll find, broadly speaking, that there are two schools of thought around the implications of artificial intelligence: the Cassandras and the Polyannas. But Reid Hoffman, a leading voice on the subject, wouldn’t classify himself as either. “There are dramatics,” he tells me, “on both sides.”
Hoffman, a cofounder of LinkedIn, has been deeply ensconced in the field of machine learning since 2015, when he became a founding investor in OpenAI, originally a nonprofit lab that burst into public consciousness when it hard-launched ChatGPT seven years later. Since then, AI, once consigned to the realm of science fiction, has become a subject of endless allure and agita.
AI fans divine that the technology will revolutionize industries like health care, retail, law, and manufacturing. Critics fear that it will douse fuel onto society’s proverbial fires, from misinformation to privacy violations to economic disruption; some naysayers even worry that humanity itself will become obsolete. That’s also to say nothing of the AI arms race that’s simmering across the Atlantic: US markets were rattled Monday by the latest from Chinese start-up DeepSeek, which now offers breakthrough AI technology at a fraction of the cost.
Perhaps the only thing we do know for certain about AI is that its future is uncertain. And that, Hoffman tells me, is the impetus of his forthcoming book, Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right With Our AI Future. In it, Hoffman and his coauthor, Greg Beato, make a full-throated case for AI as “something that society explores and discovers collectively.” They encourage readers to engage with AI—rather than shy away from it—and contend that too much regulatory oversight will only entrench economic inequities and delay the inevitable march of technological progress. “Once set in motion, new technologies exert a gravity of their own,” Hoffman and Beato write. “That is precisely why prohibition or constraint alone are never enough: they offer stasis and resistance at the very moment we should be pushing forward in pursuit of the brightest possible future.”
In an interview that has been edited for length and clarity, Hoffman explains how AI will usher in a “cognitive industrial revolution,” opens up about the “painful parts” of the transition, and explains why he thinks Silicon Valley’s political proximity to Donald Trump is, in fact, in the public’s best interest. “I actually have a higher worry about governments that are so ignorant about technology,” he says, “that by the fact that they’re so separated, [they] basically miscall the play, including regulating in really bad ways.” Following our interview, Hoffman also spoke to this week’s concerns around DeepSeek, saying in a statement that the development “demonstrates how immediate and strong the competitive talent from China is and why it’s crucial for America to continue to be at the forefront of AI development.”
Vanity Fair: You were a founding investor of OpenAI, a company that was pretty much an unknown quantity to people outside Silicon Valley back when it was founded in 2015. Seven years later, it becomes a global phenomenon after rolling out ChatGPT to the public. What’s it been like watching society’s introduction to AI, something that you’ve long believed in but was thought by probably a lot of people to be in the realm of science fiction?
Reid Hoffman: I would say a little amusing on a couple of vectors. One is, part of the reason I wrote the book is because a lot of people are responding out of fear and uncertainty. I wrote the book to say, hey, we only get a really positive future by steering toward it and not by just trying to avoid the futures we don’t like.
Another one was that you’re constantly getting a combination of skepticism and, to some degree, frankly, overhype. And that doesn’t mean that I am not a massive believer, and that this is going to be the cognitive industrial revolution, and that it’s going to make a difference in individuals’ lives on the order of the industrial revolution. So I think it’s going to be very big. On the other hand, you end up getting in a lot of science fiction conversations, which is a little bemusing. There’s dramatics on both sides. There’s dramatics on, “Well, in three years AI will be inventing fusion for us and climate change will be solved!” And you’re like, “Well, I hope so. I don’t think so.” Or, “The killer robots are coming for us and we should be bombing all the AI development factories right now.” And so it’s like, “No, I don’t think that’s in the cards right now either.”