Reid Hoffman is a prominent Silicon Valley billionaire entrepreneur and investor known for co-founding the professional social networking site LinkedIn, now owned by Microsoft. The longtime Democrat donor threw his support behind Kamala Harris in the race for the White House. Hoffman spoke to the Observer about technology in the new political milieu and his new book about our future with artificial intelligence, Superagency. The book, while not ignoring the problems that AI might cause, argues that the technology is poised to give us cognitive superpowers that will increase our individual and collective human agency, creating a state of widespread empowerment for society. You have a vested interest in being positive about AI, including a company focused on conversational AI for business, Inflection AI.

Last week saw the release of Kara Swisher's Burn Book, the highly anticipated career memoir from a titanic, justly celebrated veteran of tech journalism. Considering her unique, outsize stature in Silicon Valley, and her decadeslong record of landing bombshell inside scoops about the single most important industry of the 21st century, Swisher's choice to promote her latest project with the help of famous friends (Don Lemon, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, etc.) certainly makes sense. What makes much less sense, however, is her selection of tech-world executives. The book tour is going to be lit -- with guest moderators like @RobertIger, @laurenepowell, @mcuban, @donlemon, @reidhoffman, @sama and more. Some of the "moderators" on her tour include Laurene Powell Jobs, Disney CEO Bob Iger, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and Lean In board member Adam Grant. Per NPR's Steve Inskeep, she personally requested that these folks "interview her on stage," in a series of conversations she intends to turn into individual podcast episodes.

Kara Swisher has gotten to know a lot of tech-industry people over the years, and as she explains to producer Nayeema Raza in this episode of On With Kara Swisher, she knows "the difference between jerks and people who really actually do care about something bigger than themselves." Kara wholeheartedly believes LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman falls into the latter camp, even if the two of them don't always agree about the benefits and harms of new technologies such as artificial intelligence. Hoffman is an AI evangelist who is knee-deep in that world (including, until he recently stepped down, being on the board of OpenAI, the nonprofit behind ChatGPT and GPT-4), while Kara looks at the current AI frenzy and sees storm clouds ahead. During her conversation with Hoffman, Kara asks the longtime tech entrepreneur and investor for his thoughts on a range of topics, from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank to his political advocacy and ongoing fears about Donald Trump. She also grills Hoffman about his seemingly unflinching tech optimism; in the condensed segment below, she asks him to make his best case for several new AI-based technologies as well as explain what does, in fact, worry him about how AI could go wrong. Journalist Kara Swisher brings the news and newsmakers to you twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays.

Speak of Elon Musk and in all probability, companies like Twitter, Tesla or SpaceX will come to your mind. But little do people know about Elon Musk's company OpenAI -- an artificial intelligence (AI) research and development firm that is behind the disruptive chatbot ChatGPT. The brainchild of Musk and former Y Combinator president Sam Altman, OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022 and within a week, the application saw a spike of over a million users. Being able to do anything between coding and interacting that mimics human intelligence, ChatGPT has surpassed previous standards of AI capabilities and has introduced a new chapter in AI technologies and machine learning systems. If you are intrigued by artificial intelligence and take an interest in deep learning and how they can benefit humanity, then you must know about the history of OpenAI and the levels AI development has reached.

Inflection AI, the start-up launched earlier this month by LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman and DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, has poached artificial intelligence gurus from Google and Meta, according to CNBC analysis. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Inflection's aim is to develop AI software products that make it easier for humans to communicate with computers. When the company was launched, the only three team members that were made public were Suleyman, Hoffman and former DeepMind researcher Karén Simonyan. However, others have now joined the fold. Heinrich Kuttler left his research engineering manager role at Meta AI in London this month to become a member of the founding team at Inflection, working on the technical side of the business, according to his LinkedIn page.

LinkedIn cofounder and Greylock Partners investor Reid Hoffman tells executives who are running startups that scale fast -- the kind who want to double in size every few months -- to build ethics into their businesses. As companies plan for the future and grow their engineering or sales ranks, they should consider what can go wrong, he said, and hire people whose job is dedicated to risk management. Next, he added, companies can develop a risk framework to sort risk levels. Anything that can be a catastrophic risk to individuals, a systemic risk to company systems, or a risk to a large number of users should be handled in a proactive way to stay competitive with other startups. Hoffman, who coauthored the book Blitzscaling, joined former White House chief data scientist DJ Patil and Stanford University political science professor Amy Zegart Tuesday at the Stanford Human-Centered AI Intelligence (HAI) fall conference on AI ethics, governance, and policy symposium at the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto.

Artificial intelligence technologies are augmenting human capability and efficiency, changing the way we think about and interact with information, and creating new governance challenges and opportunities for policy makers and business leaders. Live from Stanford University, Dr. John Etchemendy and Reid Hoffman, in conversation with Ambassador Michael McFaul, discuss critical issues facing the future of human-centered AI development, innovation, and governance. John Etchemendy is the Co-Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and Provost Emeritus and Patrick Suppes Family Professor in the School of Humanities at Stanford University. Reid Hoffman is Partner at Greylock Partners, and the Co-founder and former Executive Chairman of LinkedIn. Ambassador Michael McFaul is Director and Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

OpenAI today announced the creation of OpenAI LP, a for-profit company that will be owned and controlled by the OpenAI nonprofit organization's board of directors. The new Delaware-based limited partnership was created to speed progress toward OpenAI's goal of advancing AI and eventually creating safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) system. OpenAI LP plans to raise and invest billions of dollars in the years ahead. Unlike narrow artificial intelligence common today, which can predict the probability of outcomes or recommend content in your Facebook News Feed, OpenAI defines AGI as a highly autonomous system able to outperform humans at most tasks. Sam Altman will serve as CEO of the new entity, while Greg Brockman will act as CTO and Ilya Sutskever as chief scientist.

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When future historians of Silicon Valley look back at 2017, they'll see a time when America's most powerful tech companies and the venture capital ecosystem that created them came under unprecedented scrutiny from politicians and the public. The region's innovation engine produced numerous technical advances, but controversy over fake news and revelations about sexual harassment of female entrepreneurs have cast a shadow over the Valley this year. Big tech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area were busier than ever in 2017, and artificial intelligence was a top priority for many of them. Among a long list of AI initiatives, Google launched TensorFlow Lite, a lightweight version of its open-source machine-learning software that has accelerated AI adoption among companies. The new version enables AI to run on mobile phones and household gadgets such as fridges and speakers.