- Reid Hoffman says everyone should be able to find a way to make AI useful for them.
- Hoffman told The Economist podcast he uses AI for learning and informing potential investments.
- Despite the hype, a recent Pew Research Center survey said 81% of US workers are “non-AI users.”
Reid Hoffman has some advice for anyone not finding AI useful: try harder.
“Frankly, if you haven’t found something where it’s useful to you, about something you care about, then you’re not trying hard enough, you’re not being original enough,” Hoffman told The Economist podcast in an episode that aired this week.
While the LinkedIn cofounder regularly uses AI tools in his personal and professional life, not everyone appears to be embracing it. A Pew Research Center survey found last month that 81% of US workers are “non-AI users.”
Hoffman, an AI optimist, said he uses the technology to learn new topics and to make decisions as an investor.
He gave the example of giving ChatGPT-4 a research paper on quantum mechanics and asking it to explain it at varying levels of complexity — as though he were age 12, 18, or a physics undergraduate student. “That’s probably my most common case,” he said.
Hoffman said he also uses OpenAI’s Deep Research tool “a lot” and described it as a “super-powered undergraduate research assistant.” Although he said it’s smart, he added it “lacks a little bit of common sense” and can include incorrect information.
While it means he ends up cross-checking information, Hoffman says it still saves him “tens of hours of work” and that it’s a “regular personal use” of his.
Hoffman, an early Facebook investor, said he also uses AI tools in his capacity as a venture capitalist. When looking at potential companies to invest in, he feeds PowerPoint slides of a startup’s business model into an AI tool and asks it to create a due diligence plan.
“And it generates an effective due diligence plan in, like, two minutes,” he said, adding that while some things might be obvious, it provides other suggestions that he “wouldn’t have thought of for two or three days.”
Hoffman is bullish about AI and has published a new book this month, “Superagency,” which makes a positive case for humanity’s AI future. He says he also used AI to help with feedback for the book — including asking it to critique chapters from different perspectives, such as a European professor of technological history.
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