My excellent Conversation with Reid Hoffman
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
In his second appearance, Reid Hoffman joined Tyler to talk everything AI: the optimal liability regime for LLMs, whether there’ll be autonomous money-making bots, which agency should regulate AI, how AI will affect the media ecosystem and the communication of ideas, what percentage of the American population will eschew it, how gaming will evolve, whether AI’s future will be open-source or proprietary, the binding constraint preventing the next big step in AI, which philosopher has risen in importance thanks to AI, what he’d ask a dolphin, what LLMs have taught him about friendship, how higher education will change, and more. They also discuss Sam Altman’s overlooked skill, the biggest cultural problem in America, the most underrated tech scene, and what he’ll do next.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Given GPT models, which philosopher has most risen in importance in your eyes? Some people say Wittgenstein. I don’t think it’s obvious.
HOFFMAN: I think I said Wittgenstein earlier. In Fireside Chatbots, I brought in Wittgenstein in language games.
COWEN: Peirce maybe. Who else?
HOFFMAN: Peirce is good. Now I happen to have read Wittgenstein at Oxford, so I can comment in some depth. The question about language and language games and forms of life and how these large language models might mirror human forms of life because they’re trained on human language is a super interesting question, like Wittgenstein.
Other good language philosophers, I think, are interesting. That doesn’t necessarily mean philosophy-of-language philosophers à la analytic philosophy. Gareth Evans, theories of reference as applied to how you’re thinking about this kind of stuff, is super interesting. Christopher Peacocke’s concept work is, I think, interesting.
Anyway, there’s a whole range of stuff. Then also the philosophy, all the neuroscience stuff applied with the large language models, I think, is very interesting as well.
COWEN: What in science fiction do you feel has risen the most in status for you?
HOFFMAN: Oh, for me.
COWEN: Not in the world. We don’t know yet.
HOFFMAN: Yes. We don’t know yet.
COWEN: You think, “Oh, this was really important.” Vernor Vinge or . . .
HOFFMAN: Well, this is going to seem maybe like a strange answer to you, but I’ve been rereading David Brin’s Uplift series very carefully because the theory of, “How should we create other kinds of intelligences, and what should that theory be, and what should be our shepherding and governance function and symbiosis?” is a question that we have to think about over time. He went straight at this in a biological sense, but it’s the same thing, just a different substrate with the Uplift series. I’ve recently reread the entire Uplift series.
Self-recommending!