LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman sees bright AI future

Washington: LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman has been immersed in Silicon Valley since his August 1967 birth in Palo Alto, California, in the shadow of Stanford University, where he and fellow technology luminary Peter Thiel became friends as college students during the 1980s. They went on to start PayPal during the late 1990s while working alongside a coterie of other bright-eyed entrepreneurs who went on to even bigger things, just as Hoffman did. That group – dubbed the “PayPal Mafia” – included Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, and YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Now worth an estimated $2.6 billion, Hoffman has been at the forefront of the artificial intelligence craze while investing in trailblazing startups such as ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Inflection. Unlike other prominent technologists who are worried about AI destroying humanity, Hoffman has co-written a new book called “Superagency” that makes an optimistic case for AI. He recently talked with The Associated Press.