Nicolai Tangen: Hi everyone, I'm Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund and I'm here today with Reed Hoffman who is the co-founder of LinkedIn, partner at Greylock, board member at Microsoft and one of Silicon Valley's most influential thinkers. And today we are basically going to talk about everything that's going on, AI, human potential, all the things you've been up to, Reed. So wonderful to have you here.

Reid Hoffman: It's great to be here. And you know one of these awesome things about the modern world is you know here I am in Seattle there you are in Oslo and we can have a fully robust conversation.

Nicolai Tangen: Unbelievable.

Nicolai Tangen: Absolutely now Reid you've seen multiple tech cycles from Web 1.0 to the current AI boom. Just how does it stack up compared to what you've seen before?

Reid Hoffman: Well, look, each new tech cycle and even if you do a bit of history and you kind of go back to printing press and other kinds of things as as early versions of this is new and impressive and builds upon the old and part of the current, you know, AI just, you know, massive acceleration, much bigger than much quicker, much larger, more impact than anything else is because it builds on the internet, it builds on the cloud, it builds on, you know, kind of the massive amount of data we have and the massive amount of compute we have which then makes it possible to build these amazing learning machines and so I think it's obviously the largest now in all large things you know you know like in your industry there's discussion of you know is it is it a bubble I don't think it is if anything like I don't think it's a bubble in the usual discussion of you know could it get to a collapse but the impact upon all of society is probably going to be the biggest of our lifetimes. And that's presuming that, you know, you and I have at least a number of decades ahead of us. And I think that's stunning because in industry and in life and in society, I think the fact that we've now made like learning machines as part of our firmament of the humanist world, the society is is landmark.

Nicolai Tangen: Now you see this from both sides given that you're on the Microsoft board which is like you know the incumbent and then you also invest in some of the new you know more disruptive companies. How does that shape your way of thinking?

Reid Hoffman: Well, the frequent way that people put this kind of conversation is it going to more benefit startups more benefit large companies? and the answer is massively all and which one more I don't know but I think it's important on the AI revolution that we're doing that we support both startups and large companies both of them have a substantive role in their contribution to industry and society so for example startups can't be doing the kind of things that the frontier models are doing without at least the support of the frontier model companies. So you know like for example OpenAI could only got to its position because Microsoft supported it with compute and you know similarly that's what's happening with Anthropic and others is it requires these the hyperscalers and the massive cloud companies not only in the work they're doing themselves but in the work they're doing to support the startups on the other hand the kind of risk and innovation in the startups is the thing that will drive a lot. So like example there's another relatively common meme that is well enterprises are trying to deploy it and they're not deploying it that well does that mean that it's overhyped and the answer is well if you look at small startups and the way they're deploying AI it's magical I mean the speed at which you can move with a smaller number with an initial number of employees the way that you're you can empower all aspects from team meetings to productivity and all the rest is already like massively in motion. And it's just a question of well, those companies will grow and then the large companies will need to either adapt to that probably with some speed in the next few years or run the risk of being, you know, kind of horse and buggy companies once the automobile industry starts going.

Nicolai Tangen: Where are you seeing the most kind of genuine massive transformation now as opposed to experiments?

Reid Hoffman: Well, so the short one of the things I tell people is if you're not finding the current frontier models to be useful in some substantive way to do that like for example useful in your work not just you know create a sonnet for your kids birthday or you know take a picture of what's in your fridge and ask for what a recipe could be which are great but in some substantive way that involves information analysis research decision support etc then you're not trying hard enough and in fact you know one of the things that I think for the frontier models is if you're engaging in a substantive medical decision and you're not using you or your doctor are not using you know ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini etc for a second opinion then you're also making a mistake. I myself, probably use serious AI, not simple queries, but deep ones like if I'm working on a book like my book Super Agency, what would a historian of technology give me a serious critique in what I'm doing or if I'm thinking about kind of the different kinds of molecules for therapeutics in Manis AI company I co-founded at the beginning of the year with Siddhartha Mukherjee you know what are the different attributes of the different kind of therapeutic molecules. Now that being said, I'd say the probably leading adopters are a whole bunch of stuff in coding. Because coding gives you a precision in information work. That by the way is a kind of a foreshadowing drum to what's going to really happen in legal and medical and a bunch of other things. But part of the reason I invested in Manis was because it's like, well, but there's these other areas that people aren't thinking about yet like drug discovery. What is an AI native drug discovery company look like?

Nicolai Tangen: Are you surprised that we are not seeing productivity gains yet we're not really seeing it in the productivity numbers?

Reid Hoffman: I'm not surprised yet. I mean although you know of course what is that old line I see computers everywhere but not in the numbers. I definitely see it in all the startups and I think what's in part happening is companies figuring out what to do because most of the things like the classic way a company experiments with and builds technology is they go okay this group of you know three five 10 people are all going to go do a little proof of concept and we're going to see what comes of that. Well, AI can work in some of those areas, but you have to be selective of what the project is. So for example every organization should be saying we're recording all of our meetings and we're running an AI on the recording of the meeting not just for the transcript but also to do all of the suggested follow-ups. Like all of that kind of thing is already like the technology is there to go you should already be doing it I'm doing it and yet most companies aren't that.

Nicolai Tangen: What do you think are the biggest hurdles that you see for large organizations trying to integrate AI effectively?

Reid Hoffman: Well, typically most large organizations for with a rational basis kind of start with a risk first. Avoid downside first, gain upside second. But that leads to a general like don't introduce anything until you've run all the risks to zero. And one of the things that with AI is it say well hey there's a bunch of unknown risks here like for example we're doing the meeting thing that I'm talking about. Well what happen if we have all these transcripts of meetings? Is that going to increase legal liability? Is that going to increase information bleed and flow? And you're like, well, that's a little bit like saying, you know, I'm going to drive from Oslo to Trondheim and I'm going to eliminate every risk before I get on the road. And you're like, yeah, it's not going to work. You'll never get on the road.

Nicolai Tangen: I have to say, I'm pretty impressed by your local knowledge here. Have you actually driven there?

Reid Hoffman: I have not. A friend of mine is a Norwegian born and has been talking to me about sailing in the fjords for at least two decades.

Nicolai Tangen: Very good. Now I do think it's interesting because it's the first time I've seen the potential for compliance officers to kill companies, you know.

Reid Hoffman: No, exactly. And it's one of the things where you got to go look is this really a risk because if it's not really a risk like deploy iterate and learn. Part of what we find in the venture community at in Silicon Valley and at Greylock is that we record these meetings all the times now because it gives us a set of notes. It gives us easy follow-ups. It gives us something that we can run through AI to say, "Hey, can you do research on these questions." You can trade off call it minutes of compute to instant research, very different than what you get from a Google search. And by the way, part of what the frontier models are developing is they're developing the capability for this to work coherently in compute for hours to get to a result. For example, my podcast called Possible and we've released Possible in French because we basically had AI do all the translation and compute. So having compute be amplifying of our labor is like it's here now. One of my favorite science fiction authors William Gibson wrote Neurommancer and others. One of his quotes that I really like is the future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed.

Nicolai Tangen: Do you think that dominance is under threat for for instance from immigration policies and so on?

Reid Hoffman: Well, for sure. I mean, look, the US is a country for every decade built on being the best superpower for immigration in the entire world. And Silicon Valley is a microcosm of that. I mean how much of Silicon Valley is been built by immigrants from all over the world. So the immigration is one but the next of course is that part of our ability to have global industry is because we have very good global relationships. That has been most catastrophically damaged by this administration. The going out and saying, you know, give us your lunch money or we're going to tariff you as kind of a bully tactic is terrible ways to deal with partners. Now that being said, part of what I want Europe to do more of is to get more into the technology game. If you think of a AI as a football game World Cup match between the US and China and what Europe tries to be as the referee there's two problems. One is the referee never wins and two no one really likes the referee. So you got to get on the pitch, right?

Nicolai Tangen: So Reed, what would you do specifically? Hey Reed, can you fix Europe and AI? What do you do?

Reid Hoffman: Well, one is I'd say go do deals with the various companies that hyperscalers that can build a bunch of compute. Those deals don't necessarily require money. They could just be we have facilitated a bunch of energy data center permits ability to build these data centers. In return for this facilitation, we want to make sure that you are enabling European companies to be able to access that compute. There's a tremendous amount of value in the applications. Like for example if I was a European entrepreneur I'd say well one of the benefits we have of centralized medical systems is we can use that centralized medical system to build a whole bunch of different unique medical applications and we should dominate that not just within Europe but globally. Technology industry is strongest when it's global. Which are the things that are like Spotify like Adyen and how do we get those kinds of things.

Nicolai Tangen: Continuing on the topic of ramping and scaling you wrote the book on blitzscaling, right? And does that playbook work for AI where the scarce resources are GPUs and electricity and not users?

Reid Hoffman: Well, it is actually centrally like I think if anything the AI... the precise definition of blitzscaling is taking the risk of going big in an environment of uncertainty right that is exactly what's happening with AI. We have such conviction that largescale training is going to build such interesting learning machines that we're investing like I think it's roughly like $60 billion to get a gigawatt of compute to do. And that's exactly what blitz scaling is. Now, there's limited numbers of GPUs, limited data centers, and there's limited energy. Interestingly, energy may end up being the geopolitical issue that really puts all this stuff together. But by the way, of course, you also need data and you need talent and critically you need a loop of adoption.

Nicolai Tangen: When you look at the amount of capital flowing into data centers and chips and energy. What are your reflections when it comes to the speed and magnitude?

Reid Hoffman: Yeah. This would be a classic bubble if the only use of those Nvidia chips was doing things that didn't have separate economic productivity. Part of what I think is coming with AI is we're going to get intelligence with the scale and 24x7 availability of electricity. So intelligence is going to be as available as electricity. I don't think the AI bubble as getting to a collapse is actually in fact a real worry. The AI bubble leading to potential pricing corrections is definitely of course possible. But that doesn't create the kind of contagion and debt and banking and other kinds of things that people most worry about with bubbles.

Nicolai Tangen: Related to this. What do you think the primary computing device would look like in the future?

Reid Hoffman: I'm not sure. I do think that there's a real value in all the scale compute that's going on. I do think that the notion of like an always on AI assistant for all of us is just a question of when and how. I'm one of these people who made a digital version of myself Reid AI. One of the things I realized by creating Reid AI is that it's a small number of years where like voicemail goes away because what happens when someone calls Nikolai, Nikolai AI answers. Every single device that has anything of compute capability will start adding AI to it. Like for example, washing machines as part of being green and saving electricity. So anyway, I think perhaps the answer is actually everywhere.

Nicolai Tangen: You've seen so many entrepreneurs in your life. What what are the common characteristics of great entrepreneurs?

Reid Hoffman: Important characteristics are to be super ambitious. To be both believe in that kind of huge outside capability but also learning and adjusting. They have to be able to take risks smartly. Another one is you have to be able to learn the journey. We have this phrase in American English multi-toolled athlete is really important. Entrepreneurial companies and entrepreneurs launch through networks. The founder needs to be always trying to assemble the strongest possible network to realize this vision.

Nicolai Tangen: So now you sit in your Greylock office and in I come. How long time does it take for you to decide whether I'm worth backing or not?

Reid Hoffman: Well, it depends a little bit. Ideally like I did with the Airbnb folks, I had reference checked them before I met with them. I interrupted them a few minutes into the pitch and I said, "I'm gonna make you an offer to invest." Sometimes it takes days because sometimes you've got a sense of okay I need to reference check afterwards. Usually the ideal thing in a venture investment is at day zero it looks crazy, at year two and three it looks like feasible and year five to seven it looks obvious.

Nicolai Tangen: Now you said that it's more damaging to pass on a great investment than to back a poor one.

Reid Hoffman: Well, it's still true that on the venture world and generally speaking investing in tech, if you can get into some of the great ones, that's all that matters. And missing one of those matters a lot more. If I think this could be one of the great ones then I tend to have to talk my way out of investing than talk my way into investing.

Nicolai Tangen: Given all that and given all your experience, what is your advice to young people?

Reid Hoffman: My very first book is called The Start-up of You. It's take all the entrepreneurial lessons that I learned from Silicon Valley because I think we're all becoming need to be much more entrepreneurial in times of disruption. You have to lead your career in a much more entrepreneurial way. The central thing of course is that young people should pitch firms on is I'm a native AI user. You need to be AI transformed. Here's the way that my experience with AI can come help you and your organization. You guys are generation AI, that's the thing you should be leaning into.

Nicolai Tangen: Good advice to generation AI. Yes, Reed, you kind of feels like part of Generation AI as well. So, it's been just tremendous to talk to you.

Reid Hoffman: I think we can you can opt to join it, which I'm trying to. I try to use AI in new ways every week.

Nicolai Tangen: But, uh, big thanks.