Why Reid Hoffman believes A.I. should stand for ‘amplification intelligence’

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Transcript

Reid Hoffman: The reason I like light bulb jokes is I feel that they’re a form of cultural haiku. How many Californians does it take to change a light bulb? Five. One to do it. Four to share the experience.

Alan Murray: Leadership Next is powered by the folks at Deloitte, who, like me, are exploring the changing rules of business leadership and how CEOs are navigating this change.

Welcome to Leadership Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I’m Alan Murray.

Michal Lev-Ram: And I’m Michal Lev-Ram.

Murray: Michal, you want to tell us why Reid Hoffman was telling light bulb jokes at the beginning of this episode?

Lev-Ram: Because they’re funny. But really, the reason is that this has become kind of his own little Turing test for ChatGPT. And what he realized with GPT-4 is that it’s finally, this technology, A.I., is at a stage where it can tell some pretty funny, and, you know, compelling and human-like light bulb jokes. And he’s tried this before with other iterations, other technologies. and that hasn’t been the case. So this was kind of like a little bit of an a-ha moment for him. This is ready for primetime.

Murray: There is no question that A.I. is the topic of the moment. Every conversation I have with a business leader these days, sooner rather than later gets into A.I. ChatGPT, I think, has captured everyone’s imagination.

Lev-Ram: Yeah, and that’s why we thought it would be a good topic to discuss on Leadership Next. Reid knows a lot about generative A.I. and A.I. more broadly, for many other reasons. He is the cofounder of LinkedIn, perhaps he’s best known for that. But he’s also a partner at the VC firm Greylock, and he was an early investor in OpenAI, the company that, of course, developed ChatGPT. And he’s written a book called Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI.

Murray: It’s a great book, but what’s distinctive…