LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman — the entrepreneur, author, podcaster, venture capitalist and Microsoft board member — is on the front lines of the artificial intelligence revolution.
Even as a pioneer in the AI field, it was a bit unusual (yet informative) today to see Hoffman sit down for a 14-minute interview with a virtual AI twin of himself — informed by a customized GPT trained on 20 years of Hoffman’s podcasts, speeches and books.
Call it Hoffman on Hoffman.
In the second half of the interview, the real Reid Hoffman addressed a number of topics presented by his AI twin — regulation, ethics, jobs and the benefits of using digital twins to “make more human connections.”
But one topic struck us as newsworthy, when the real Hoffman was asked about the pivot at Inflection AI (a company Hoffman co-founded) and the impact of co-founder and CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s move to Microsoft last month as the CEO of the newly formed group Microsoft AI.
Hoffman called Inflection AI a “wonderful agent” that’s trained as much on emotion as it is on IQ.
“It’s a great consumer thing,” Hoffman told his AI interviewer. “One of the things we realized when we were doing it is, Mustafa really wanted to be building the consumer thing at scale. But the business was going to take years and years to develop. Whereas the developer business — the API business — is actually where the real startup opportunity is.”
With the move to Microsoft, Hoffman said that Suleyman can focus on the consumer opportunities where the mechanics of the business model do not need to be proven immediately.
Meanwhile, Sean White — who was named CEO of Inflection AI last month and previously worked at Mozilla — can focus on the new business direction of the startup.
Hoffman said this insight was like discovering “magic that you hadn’t even thought was there.”
