This transcript is generated with the help of AI and is lightly edited for clarity.
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REID:
Aria, welcome back from a summer extravaganza of sabbatical with the family in Europe. It’s awesome that you’re back.
ARIA:
Reid, I am so delighted. And wouldn’t you know, the first weekend I was back on the job, the AI world, of course, explodes with news and Twitter posts. And so we are going to jump right into that. So as everyone saw recently, there have been warnings from researchers at Anthropic and OpenAI that have brought concerns about losing control of advanced AI to a much broader public—such a broader public that last week my 75-year-old mother forwarded me an email from Heather Cox Richardson and said, “Have you heard about this Anthropic AI news? It’s a big deal.” So it has certainly escaped the tech world. Everyone is talking about this. Anthropic’s head of alignment, Evan Hubinger, even put his personal estimate of AI causing human extinction within the next decade above 10%.
And now, that’s his assessment. It’s not a scientific consensus. I don’t know how he is so sort of certain in particular about above 10%. And it is not an official company forecast. But of course, that sort of raises concerns. And the warnings concern more advanced self-improving systems rather than a claim that today’s chatbots, you know, pose this extinction risk. It’s just at how fast things are improving. Then Dario Amodei proposed pacing the frontier, giving safety work time to catch up with advances in AI capabilities. And we’ve heard this before. You and I have discussed, you know, should we pause? What does that mean for the U.S. versus other countries? Dario’s proposals include embedded outside evaluators, coordination among AI labs and democratic governments, and international agreements.
And so Anthropic has committed to these embedded evaluators. Sam Altman from OpenAI has said OpenAI will implement them soon, too. Super interesting to see sort of the heads of the AI labs actually agree on this. Other industry leaders have expressed support sort of for this general idea, but not something specific. So the accelerationist and decelerationist crowds, you know, they’ve had a field day arguing in public, in private, on Twitter about what we should do. So when you think about all of these warnings and proposals, does this feel like meaningful progress? And what is missing from this discussion?
REID:
You know, as you know, what I tend to say is, hey, it’s less about acceleration, deceleration—and that actually frequently is a false dichotomy of various sorts, and either one, especially in extreme, being deeply wrong—but more about steering. Now, part of steering is sometimes when you get to a particular curve, you slow down when you go around that curve. But you’re slowing down with a purpose of where you’re going to, not, “I’m just slowing down.” I’m kind of going around. Now, you know, obviously you push the metaphor and you say, well, if you’re heading towards a cliff, you stop, right? If it’s a cliff. But this kind of gets to what are the actual ways I think we should analyze, you know, what they call safety concerns.
The first is kind of X-risk, you know, existential risk. And I think that actually, in fact, the kind of X percent in a decade, et cetera, et cetera, are all in the kind of histrionic category. And they may be, in some cases, deeply well-meaning, like, e.g., “I don’t know how to call the percentage.” And it’s a little bit like, you know, you’re exploding the Hiroshima bomb and it’s going to split the Earth’s core, and we’re going to be one molten, you know, thing. And “I don’t know how to articulate a percentage, so I just put a solid number on it” as a way of doing it.
ARIA:
You say 10%, people will pay attention.
REID:
Yes, exactly. And so whereas, you know, when I kind of chart out the existential risk, I kind of go, look, there’s only a very specific set of scenarios where it gets there in that kind of time. There are multiple checkpoints along the way, there are multiple things we can do, there’s multiple telemetry. And so I tend to think that the X-risk—the existential risk—is the way of saying, “Look at me, look at me. It’s really important. This is a key moment in history. It’s really important you talk to me about this.” And so I broadly, across the whole set, including the Anthropic people, who are driving the frontier along with OpenAI on this, which is part of the well-commentated irony of all this thing.
I didn’t go, no, I didn’t think that’s well-meaning. But the sky is falling, the sky is falling, the sky is falling. Now we get to the three real ones, which are biorisk, cyber risk, and jobs. Biorisk is the closest that you get to kind of existential risk of various forms. And by the way, it’s doable without AI. It gets amplified with AI. But also, the only defense to biorisk, I can say, is AI. And so one of the reasons why you kind of go, this pause stuff is malformed—the decelerationist, the extreme decelerationist—is that basically, by being ahead and by formulating the defense, is the basic way to counter the biorisk side. So that’s the first reason why I’m kind of pause-opposed, right? And steering.
Steering with a general sense of acceleration and speed, not the kind of precautionary principle. The second one, cyber, is the one that we have real line of sight to. We know from Mythos, and we know from other things, that there is, like, a real upping of the arms race in capability. And part of the problem is we have so many frail systems. And the frail systems can be, you know, hospitals and utilities and banking, a whole bunch of other things. And again, you say, well, why not pause? It’s like, well, the real risk from cyber is the open-weight models and their deployment in ways, because yes, you know, like, hey, we haven’t trained the frontier models so that they are perfect and never do anything wrong on the cyber stuff.
And we can come back to the Hugging Face side. By the way, there’s one way of telling the Hugging Face story, which is, sure, that was a kind of startling way of doing reward hacking and all the rest of it. But also, what they had is bad password security that the AI discovered. It was not undiscoverable by a human. It wasn’t a superhuman cyber hack.
ARIA:
Right, right.
REID:
And by the way, that means that it’s demonstrating what the open-weight models—which are not that far behind, six to 12 months—can be doing, and can be doing in the privacy of iterating offline in a non-internet-connected cloud cluster, and then be used, whether it’s by rogue state actors, whether it’s by criminals, whether it’s by crazy people, you know, just people who want to do—who just want to up, you know, in the parlance. And so we know, we see it, it’s line of sight. It’s not like, “Oh, let’s speculate, it could be A, it could be B, let’s tell some science fiction stories.” It’s there. Once again, when you say, well, why do you say not pause, why not decelerate?
It’s like, well, what we need to be doing is taking the fact that we have a lead on frontier models and doing the hardening and the rewriting and the defense side of this in a really intense way. So that’s another reason why I tend to be a smart accelerationist, right? You know, strategic optimist about the way to do this. Now, the third, which is, you know, roughly—you know, Bill Gates most recently said, hey, we don’t have anyone working on what the job transformation will be. We don’t know what the job translation will be, but it could be kind of sudden and quick and important. And I think that’s right.
And he was careful to point out that there are all these positive features around AI for what can be done, including agriculture and a bunch of other things. And I think that people should be thinking about a combination of two things on jobs. One is, you know, kind of telemetry, like, where do we see that it’s actually, in fact—you know, measuring where it’s actually beginning to really happen. And we should go to that area—customer service, sales, et cetera—and really try to help a lot in particular. And the second is, what does the tool set look like? And the key thing on the tool set is—and I think there are a few people who’ve begun working on this.
You know, former Secretary Gina Raimondo is doing some really great work here. There are a few people. But one of the key things that I think is lacking here is your solution has to have the same speed, scale, and cost of the problem, of which the only thing I see right now is AI. So you need to have AI on the ledger. It has to have the same impedance match. The AI has to be on the solutions ledger. So it’s like, what are we doing to shape AI to be helping with job transformation? Now, part of the reason I don’t say, well, why don’t you just slow, or why don’t you just do the Bill Gates human reserve thing, is that 90% of human beings are going to argue, “My job should be in human reserve.”
Hell, venture capital should be in human reserve. You know, like, everything should be in human reserve. And, you know, so it doesn’t really solve any particular problem, other than you might slow a specific thing down for a bit. You know, it’s kind of like the equivalent of auto work changing and all that kind of thing. But I think that the question is like, okay, we’re going to have job transformation. People don’t per se like to say, “I have a job, I don’t want job transformation.” And it’s like, yeah, you know, look, same thing for the weavers in England. You’re going to have job transformation. How do you make that easier? And I think there are two vectors.
One vector, which is really under-commentated, is that you must be giving people something—that they’re at least getting something. It’s not like, “Oh, you’re going to create job transformation that’s going to make your tech companies rich and give me a bunch of problems that I don’t really want, and I’m getting nothing other than having this scramble.” Of course people are very opposed to that pitch. So you say, okay, how about a medical assistant? Only really, really wealthy people have a 24/7 good medical assistant. How about that for everybody? And how about that for free for everybody, in terms of navigating the stuff? And it’s you, your kids, your parents, your pets, the whole thing. Like, okay, how about a legal assistant, right?
Most people can’t afford lawyers to look at their rental agreement, to look at these other things. Now you have that. How about, you know, educational tutors? And that’ll obviously help a lot with not just having an AI system to help you do new jobs, but also to help you learn stuff and help you find things. And by the way, how about, you know, AI for government services, so you don’t have to go to the DMV anymore? You know, it can all be handled. So all of that I think is really important, to go, “Oh, look, I’m getting some things. I’m still unhappy about my job transformation, but I’m getting some things while I’m doing it.”
And then I think the other part of this is to say, how do we kind of put in some fact that we’re the advantage. This is why the Industrial Revolution, parallel to the fact that we’re leading to say, hey, let’s create some incentives for tech companies creating things that help your kind of middle-class Americans. You’d like to make the job transition work well, right, in terms of things. And you know that that will be invented as we go. You’d like to know it’s going to be exactly this—it’s going to be like, we’re going to have care jobs, and the care jobs for 30% of people coming on a sale will be helped this way.
And then we’re going to have, you know, other kinds of, like, context awareness and AI training jobs, and that work. The problem is, look, you could say those things. The real thing is we have to be adaptive in terms of where we’re going. So I think that’s the key thing. And I’ll say one last point.
Part of the reason why, when it gets to the jobs thing, I’m still, you know, kind of a smart accelerationist, a steering accelerationist, is that when America—or country of your choice—is getting the prosperity of having intelligence at the scale and speed and cost of electricity applied to a whole bunch of different things, that creates the economics by which we can sort this problem out. If we don’t have those economics, then we’re unable to sort the problem out. And this isn’t a “hey, help the tech people get rich while everyone else suffers.” I think it’s really important we have this dual mandate, where, like, 60-plus percent of Americans are having challenging times right now. We need to be helping them.
And you say, well, what’s a return to manufacturing jobs in the U.S.? It’s AI and robotics. It’s the only way we’re going to get there. See, as kind of an instance probe. Look, if you look at the data centers, all the unions are going, “This is creating a bunch of great union jobs. We’re positive on this. We want to do this. This capital inflow gives us a bunch of work while we’re doing it.” That’s actually really important. And that kind of prosperity is an important thing for the 60-plus percent of Americans who are, you know, in turbulent times right now.
ARIA:
I mean, to your point, people make trade-offs on everything. They make trade-offs between crime and security and personal privacy. And it feels like right now we’re not giving people any other side of the trade-off. We’re just telling them all of the bad things. And to your point, they can’t see, feel, touch—they haven’t seen the benefits yet. And you know, you mentioned one thing about the irony of, you know, Dario and Sam sort of making these calls when they’re steering the ship. And I think I’ve seen, you know, hundreds, thousands of memes of everyone saying, you know, like, “I’m running the boiling-people factory and I’m deeply concerned about boiling people.” Like, people are just like, “You guys are running the show. How are you sounding the alarm?”
And even David Sacks, over the weekend, responding to Sam and Dario—you know, he said, and I quote, “Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel.” End quote. You know, he warned that failing to slow voluntarily would reveal another bid for regulatory capture. And a lot of people talk about that—“Oh, this is just regulatory capture.” And his argument was like, “You can already do this. You don’t need us.” And so my question for you is, do you think that’s a fair criticism—that, sure, they can just already do it? And do you think doing it would sort of lock in any, you know, regulatory capture mode—would sort of just be putting them far ahead of everyone else?
REID:
You know, maybe for the first time in a decade, I partially agree with Sacks. I mean, since most of his activities have been pretty, shall we say, suboptimal for society, to be polite. And, you know, he’s also kind of like, as a kind of a sociopathic political actor, you know, those concerns. But what he’s right about is to say, look, the people who are sounding the alarm are the people who are out on the frontier and in the front. So you go, okay, why are you saying you need us to slow things down? Because you could slow down, right?
And if you wanted to put a particular point on it and say, how about we define the frontier where you’re at, and we say this is the point where everyone has to slow down, and it gives other people a chance to catch up—are you happy with that? And the answer will be, not really. And so that’s, I think, the substance of his position. Now, that being said, I think part of the more detailed thing is to say, look, part of it is there’s this question about, you know, OpenAI and Anthropic not just being the world leaders, but also national champions. And to say, if you’re doing a slowdown, you should get at least China bought in in some kinds of ways.
And so it doesn’t really make sense, given that China is, you know, call it six to 12 months behind us, to kind of do a unilateral slowdown just for that. And so it’s a call for, you know, kind of an international treaty on this, which, you know, Sacks, in his normal, like, completely political—you know, call it disinformation—makes it entirely an internal thing, versus actually, in fact, this is what they’re substantively trying to kind of say and kind of call for. And that is a thing that fits within it. And it’s not an antitrust law. It’s a question of international treaty.
And, you know, this is what both Anthropic and OpenAI have been calling for for a year or two, in terms of, you know—and then Demis Hassabis came out recently also in this, as a way of navigating, and in particular with recursive self-improvement. You know, that’s, I think, the thing that brings the urgency for why they’re calling for it again, because you go, well, recursive self-improvement, we don’t know. And this is part of—gets back to, you know, Hu Hurd’s, you know, kind of call, is like, well, we don’t know where the recursive self-improvement fully goes. It’s a unique thing. And it’s one of the things where you say, well, your steering and acceleration and deceleration metaphor has some challenges, because it’s like the car is doing itself—accelerating, and it’s accelerating, and it’s kind of taking over the steering a little bit as it accelerates. So what’s that?
And it’s like, well, we don’t know how to 100%, like, completely do that now. We still do know how to pull the plug. You know, like requiring a kill switch, requiring telemetry—those are good things for governments to do. This is one of the things that, you know, I’ve been trying for eight years to kind of say: this is how governments should plug in. And it’s not the same kind of thing as regulatory capture.
It’s not the same thing as slowing everybody down, because those things can be done with this de minimis—you know, kind of like, it doesn’t really affect your speed at all, and gives you at least some ability to do that. And so I think those are, you know, good things to do. But it’s, you know, here, you know, a historic moment. You know, I don’t 100% disagree with—I double-digit percentage disagree with Sacks, and disagree with his actual intent here, by mischaracterizing the other side. But, you know, like, there’s a point here, right?
ARIA:
There are some things they can do.
REID:
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ARIA:
In your responses, you’ve been talking a lot about, you know, the 60% of Americans who are struggling right now, and sort of, we want to make sure that the future is better than the past. And so last week you came out with an essay arguing for a dual mandate: economic prosperity for the many and American AI leadership. And your essay begins with Americans’ existing economic insecurity that you’ve discussed—paying utility bills, affording medical care, saving for retirement, you know, finding and keeping stable work that’s going to be here in a few years. And, you know, you argue that people have heard these promises about the prosperity that new technologies will create—and new technology has created a lot of prosperity—but right now people aren’t feeling it, and they’re not seeing it in the future with AI.
And you know, you’ve said that the next several years are really the time, the opportunity, to set these terms. And it’s going to be these decisions about infrastructure, oversight, access, support for workers that will sort of determine the course of AI and American prosperity. And so you say that we can and must do two things at once: secure America’s lead in AI and deliver this prosperity—not just for the few, not just for the tech leaders, but for the many. So talk about why you wrote this essay about sort of the demand, the need, for both at the same time.
REID:
The first is, if you say, hey, we want to do stuff for the broad base of Americans, you have to have the money to do so. And as at least some people have tracked, you know, one of our problems is we’ve been, for the last few decades, with, you know, kind of crazy government spending, and it’s under both administrations—both, you know, red and blue administrations. I mean, one of the things that’s really important is to kind of say we have to grow our way out. We have so much debt. It’s kind of like your average American should think of ourselves as having maxed out two of our three credit cards, in terms of how we’re doing this.
And I think that the only way to do it is grow. And if we don’t, and if we fall behind, then all of a sudden, not only are we not getting the economic prosperity of this, but if comparatively we’ve fallen well behind, then with the debt trap, it just becomes—you know, we’re like Argentina in the ’70s. I mean, it’s a really, really serious issue. And so, you know, this is one of the things that, you know, obviously I criticize people who are articulating support for the Trump administration, saying, “Oh, we’re business people.” It’s like, we’re even spending more, like drunken sailors. We’re getting into wars with Iran, we’re increasing oil prices, we’re doing tariff wars to reduce our economic prospects.
You know, it’s just massive slaughtering of American business prospects under kind of an attempt to kind of claim American glory and supremacy, and, you know, having the exact opposite. So I think that’s why being in the lead—and at least amongst the leaders, if not the leader, in AI—for the economic benefit is super important. And by the way, that’s the only thing that’s currently propping up our economy, is all this capital coming in. Investing in AI isn’t just for the tech companies. This is one of the reasons why most of the labor unions are strongly in favor, because they’re like, “We’re building out things. It’s massive amounts on the grid and in construction. And so let’s make this happen.”
Like, let’s take this investment, and it creates a whole bunch of middle-class jobs, which benefit lots of communities. And by the way, most of these data centers are not in the middle of cities; they’re other places. So it’s prosperity there. So that’s the reason why continuing to win from the AI kind of economic investment boom, which will turn into the, you know, kind of intelligence-everywhere economic boom—you know, and there may be some turbulence, and there may be some, “Oh, look, it takes a couple extra years to play out.” That’s just timing in short end form—is super important to us. And then you go, okay, well, you know, what are other people’s other complaints? Like, well, are all the people going to benefit from this, or all the tech people? Right?
And I’ve already said some things, but like ongoing and endurance. It’s like, well, that’s why you need to be doing things to help with the 60-plus percent of Americans. And what do Americans really most want? They want to have work that shows their value, that helps them provide for their families and their community. That’s what they want. And so providing good work that is well paid there is what’s really important. And we need to make that a national priority as well. And frankly, both parties should come together on this. This should be a thing that both parties want, right? It shouldn’t be a “let’s see how well we can sink the other party.”
Like, this should be something that says, look, we’re going to have arguments on various things, and on this one we both agree it really, really matters. And so then the question is, how do we take our leadership in AI and convert it to help with that? It’s like we’ve got a train that’s going. We want to put the right cars on the train and bring along the 60-plus percent of Americans. Now, that’s part of the reason why leadership in AI is so important, because it gives us the money and economic prosperity in order to do everything. Now, where are we at with 60-plus percent of Americans? The answer is, it’s difficult, right? You know, can we fill the tank with gas? Can we afford groceries and eggs?
And obviously, you know, global mishandling of global things, like starting the war with Iran and closing the Strait of Hormuz—and, like, everyone for decades has realized that would be an indication causes gas prices to go well up. And that’s on us for making that happen, on the Trump administration. But, like, it’s a decades-long problem, too; that’s just a recent acceleration on it. And so, you know, this is not a, you know, kind of like, “Oh, we should do something for the middle class, we should just kind of raise minimum wage a little bit.” There are some fundamental problems of both kind of causing, you know, raises for 60-plus percent of Americans and reducing prices. And this is a, you know, critical problem.
Like, this is not like discretionary—“Oh, am I taking a holiday, you know, overseas or into a different state?” This is an “I’m trying to make my family work, my children work, my communities work.” And it’s really important that all of us as Americans, you know, kind of steer into this. And that’s part of the reason why it’s so clear that America needs a dual mandate. And part of that dual mandate is, you know, kind of like, continue to win at AI—and also, you know, that’s kind of the train engine—attach the cars that make this go for 60-plus percent of Americans. Now, some of the job stuff will be, you know, figured out as we go.
Everyone would like to know exactly what’s going to happen, but we don’t actually even know where the full job transformation will hit, and what percentages, and will it be in customer service and sales first, which is what I expect. And when you begin seeing that as the kind of telemetry—we don’t know what other kinds of new jobs we open up. Say, hey, with all of this AI thing, maybe there will be, for a decade, a whole bunch of training AI on a whole bunch of cognitive and physical things in order to make that work. Maybe there will be kind of things around, like, oh, the care economy, which most people say, “Oh, you think we’re all going to become nurses?”
No, no, it’s like everything from what are we doing with kids, and what are we doing with teaching, and what are we doing with public services. You know, what’s going to happen in terms of, you know, kind of the broadening out of entertainment and physical events. There are all these different areas, and so it’s not just like, “Oh, does everyone have to learn how to code now?” There’s a whole range. And that’s the reason why, like, people who say it’s this one thing—that’s, you know, kind of not going to happen. What we have to be is nimble and helpful.
And that’s part of the reason why starting to build the helpful things now—where they see that there are helpful things, they see that you are talking to them and with them, in terms of what’s the conversation, what do you guys need, and then what are the kinds of things we’re doing now. That’s part of the reason why the data center side of this—particularly, the dialogue has been Bozoville, right? Bozoville on one side, saying, “Ah, like, free market. Whatever happens, who cares? You know, let the local communities be driven into trying to get the contract jobs, into, like, bad tax deals for 30 years, and pay off the rich companies.” And then, “Oh, let’s have a moratorium,” right?
Because you’re like—you know, the moratorium folks don’t understand, like, how much economics flow in with the construction and the grid and so forth. What we need is to say, no, no, local communities have to be bought in and informed, and it has to be something that’s better for them. So if you want something national, just say no data centers can be built without, like, kind of clear evidence that you’re keeping electricity costs the same or driving them down for the local area, right? Full stop. And that the environmental impact is handled. Full stop. And then allow the local community to say, “Hey, well, for us, we’d like to make sure that you’re doing that. You’re also bringing some longer-term jobs here.”
“We’d like to make sure that you’re doing some stuff.” Obviously, things like noise abatement, all the rest, have to be done. But we’re making sure you’re doing all of that. And that is, I think, why the dual mandate is so important, because it’s both, you know, like, continue to drive forward this economic train of AI, and make sure that the 60-plus percent of Americans who need it are benefiting. And that doesn’t mean there won’t be job transformation. I’m not trying to be Pollyannaish here. But, like, part of the reason I’m a strategic optimist is you don’t get the good future by trying to prevent the bad futures. You get the good future by steering towards it. And that’s what we need to be doing.
ARIA:
I feel like so much of this is about trust. You know, you’ve talked about trust so much, and people have lost trust in companies, in governments, you know, in AI companies. And I think that really is what this—you know, the only bipartisan thing we have right now is that people don’t like data centers. And again, I think it’s because they feel like there’s a loss of control. The one thing they can control is data centers. So how do you convince people, right? Maybe not even convince people. How do we make sure that once we have these mandates in place—“Oh, yeah, don’t worry, it’s not going to raise your electricity bill. Don’t worry, it’s not going to cause, you know, environmental degradation in your local community”—
How do we get people to trust that? Because I think they’re saying, like, “Yeah, that’s a lot of nice lip service, but I don’t believe that it’s going to happen.”
REID:
So, two answers—maybe three answers—on the trust side. So the first is, start doing things now that benefit. So, medical assistant: with some simple—like, it wouldn’t cost the government anything—some simple shifting of kind of safe harbor liability law, like, three or four companies would make free medical assistants available to everybody in the U.S. You could start seeing that. You know, you can already kind of consult ChatGPT and others for medical, but they don’t advertise it. And they try to play it down to say, “Oh, no, no, we’re not trying to give medical advice. That’s not us.” And it already works much better than you’d expect. But you could say, “Yes, we are doing it.”
“And we’re doing it this way, and we’re making it and we’re tuning it to be better. We’re specifically investing in it to make it better for you.” And then, unlike, for example, what trial lawyers would want, which is, “Oh, if you’re investing in it, then we can”—then it’s full-time employment for trial lawyers. That’s not what we want. We want to help the 60-plus percent of Americans, right, navigate these kinds of key life issues. So that’s number one: start doing things now. Number two is, you know, like, you have to reevaluate—kind of like, you’re like, “I just don’t trust you.” And it’s like, well, look: “I don’t trust you”—you’re going to go off a cliff. We have this huge debt.
It’s a little bit like, the fact is, there are always things to mistrust in government. Part of the reason why we want to be building trust in government is because if you mistrust it, you guarantee you go off a higher cliff, sooner, faster, right? And so building that trust is part of what I believe is our national responsibility. It’s our responsibility as Americans. It doesn’t mean blind and everything, and your trust doesn’t mean everything you do, but it’s like, look, we have to work together in order to make that work. And by the way, people say, “Well, I mistrust big tech.” It’s like, you mean—you know, usually what they mean is social media and children. And by the way, so does a lot of Silicon Valley.
But then you go, well, like search and mobile phones, and, like, there’s Netflix and lots and lots of things. And, like, for example, when I say, hey, social networks can be done well, I point to LinkedIn. So it’s like, look, don’t kind of go to “I just see red and have no trust.” You have to be engaging in the trust dialogue. You have to be saying, okay, how can we move forward? How can we do this? And be having a bias and disposition to that. And that gets to kind of the third thing, which is, they say, “Oh, Reid, you’re just an optimist.” And they kind of mean that as, you’re just kind of like, “Oh, I just close my eyes and say it’ll work out. Hit the accelerator.”
And it’s like, okay, yeah, that’s pretty foolish, if that was actually, in fact, what anyone, or myself, were thinking. But part of being a strategic optimist is, you only—like, think about planning a journey somewhere. And if you said, “Oh, I’m going to plan a journey, and what I’m going to do in the journey is make sure that there’s going to be zero chance that anything will go wrong. Zero chance. No potholes, no delays, no possible accidents on the highway.” Well, you’re never going to get in the car, you’re never going to go anywhere, and then nothing’s going to ever happen. You have to kind of say, look, what’s the way that we kind of plan that, and go?
And sometimes, by the way, you frankly just start going, because you don’t know—“Oh, shoot, now there’s been an accident on the highway in front of me. We have to replan.” And fine. Or they’re like, “Now there’s a real slowdown because the accident happened, you know, 10 cars ahead of me,” right? And so forth. And you’re just like, “Okay.” You just go, “All right.” You adjust as you go. And I think that’s also really key in trust, which is you have to be trying to build that out. And I think that’s important. And I think, you know, so frequently when you say, “Hey, trust the tech companies”—“Oh, you mean trust them on doing everything?” It’s like, no, no.
Trust them to be intelligent about what they’re trying to do with the customers, intelligent about what they’re trying to do with their employees. Trust the fact that a bunch of their employees will be happily whistleblowing if they think there’s an issue, you know, and we should navigate those as we’re going. And I think that’s the thing. And obviously, you know, it doesn’t surprise me that the Anthropic people are the most whistleblowing on the AI side, because part of the reason they left OpenAI was because they were worried about this. So they’re predisposed, by the way, to my earlier comments. I do think it’s worth being in the dialogue on that, and I think it’s a good thing to whistleblow. But that’s the reason I went through the detailed analysis.
ARIA:
And I think, to your point, all tech companies aren’t alike. Like, there are some bad actors in the space, and they have proven to be bad actors because they have child sexual abuse material on their platform. There are other people, like Anthropic, who have said, “Hey, we’re trying our best here, and we’re trying to work.” And they have been a better actor. So let’s also reward the tech companies who have said, “Let’s be environmentally positive. Let’s try to make this happen.”
REID:
Yes, exactly.
ARIA:
All right, Reid, we’re going to switch gears to something that is near and dear to my heart—a place where we get to talk about all of these things, like you said, to, most importantly, be in conversation about the good and the bad and the exciting futures. The Masters of Scale Summit does return to San Francisco October 20 to 22. And for those of you who don’t know, it brings together founders, entrepreneurs, technologists, cultural creators, all together to have these conversations about how we can build the future. And, you know, we move from AI risks to the people giving Reid reasons for optimism. And so let’s talk about a brief Summit preview. We’ve talked a lot about what could go wrong.
And like you said, some people call you, you know, a perpetual optimist. Who is making you optimistic right now? And will we see any of them at Masters of Scale Summit?
REID:
Well, we will see a few of them. Among amazing things, we’ll see—we’ll be opening with Sarah Friar from OpenAI. We’ll have Mikey Shulman from Suno, which—because I’ve been making, you know, kind of AI music, like a celebratory record for America’s 250th, and Suno, you know, plays a good, good role there. I’m, you know, really amazed.
But then, of course, you know, old friends: Reed Hastings, Amjad Masad, Meredith Whittaker. And I think we should expect the same thing that we normally get from Masters of Scale Summit, which is some really important business lessons, but also a broader range of what does this mean for our society, and how should we be as leaders, and what are the cultural beats that we need to be paying attention to, and to try to kind of collectively create energy. Because, look, we try to get as interesting people as we can on the stage, and as interesting kinds of things, but it’s the people to your left and right that we put a lot of energy into making sure are there.
And the aim is to kind of leave energized and turn serious, real, big problems into opportunities, which is, of course, what entrepreneurship is. And entrepreneurship at scale is how we make a real difference in society.
ARIA:
Awesome, Reid. I cannot even wait for it. And for those of you who cannot be here in person, you can listen along on the Masters of Scale podcast to hear all about it.
REID:
It’ll be great.
Possible is produced by Palette Media. It’s hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Thanasi Dilos, Katie Sanders, Spencer Strasmore, Yimu Xiu, Aman Suri, Danny Garrison, Trent Barboza, and Tafadzwa Nemarundwe.
ARIA:
Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Relles.