On May 24, 2024, I received an honorary doctorate from the University of Perugia and gave a speech entitled Humanity’s Hegelian Golden Braid. The speech centers on AI, humanity, and technology—and weaves through Hegel and Hofstadter, cathedrals and griffins, T.S. Elliot and Hyman Minsky, and more. A special thanks to Shaun Young, Alec Ross, Rector…
It was only a little more than a year ago that after gaining beta-access to Dall-E, I enjoyed exploring the visual possibilities of “words that could create images.” At the start of 2023, as an early tester of GPT-4, I was firmly in the thrall of text conversations. The countless exploratory chats that came of…
This speech was originally delivered by Reid Hoffman in English on September 8, 2023 at the Bologna Business School at the University of Bologna, the oldest university in the Western world. I’ve used AI—no human editing in this case to show what’s possible with the technology—to translate this speech into over 100 languages. View those…
When techno-optimists use ChatGPT, they see Star Trek: a future in which opportunities for personal fulfillment are as large as the universe itself.
When you use DALL-E, a new AI system that generates images from natural language descriptions, words become your pencils, paints, brushes, cameras, lenses, chisels, and more. In the DALL-E universe, though, there’s never just one way to translate written language into graphic language. Inverting the old proverb on its head, a single word – or…
DALL-E amplifies human creativity and increases the impact and value of visual professionals across a huge range of industries. From Leonardo Da Vinci to Andy Warhol, great artists have always utilized apprentices and assistants to help fulfill their creative visions. DALL-E is a highly accessible AI assistant that makes it easy for everyone to tap their inner Leonardos. …
Today’s young people haven’t been ruined by social media. They’ve been equipped to unleash the power of a new technological era. The class of 2022 finds itself graduating into a surprisingly strong work environment, especially compared with its immediate predecessors. For the moment, employers are hiring again, and the labor market is relatively favorable even…
Knowing my background in philosophy, Brad Feld and Dave Jilk recently invited me to contribute a foreword for their new book, The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors. It’s now available andI highly recommend it; click here to get your copy. Here’s the foreword I wrote for it. Nietzsche is a troubling and troublesome philosopher. In different decades…
Attracting investment is such a fundamental part of entrepreneurship that it’s easy to think about it with less nuance than one should. After all, the job of investors is to invest. And their incentive to do so is clear – they’re looking for a big financial return on their investment. So what’s to over-think? If…
Utopia or dystopia? Between the promises of powerful new technologies like AI and the challenges of major problems like climate change, disinformation at scale, and wealth concentration, how we get to the future we want is a question I spend a lot of time thinking about these days. It’s also the subject of Eric Lander’s…
Shortly after I graduated from college in 1990, America entered a recession. The unemployment rate peaked at 7.3 percent in 1991. That same year, the U.S. experienced a record number of murders. The world was also in the midst of the AIDS epidemic. Tens of thousands of people around the world were dying from a…
Today, there is a vigorous debate raging between cryptocurrency and centralized currencies. Bitcoin celebrated its tenth anniversary this year, and cryptocurrency values overall were climbing again after a period of decline. Media interest increased again too, and with it, arguments about cryptocurrency’s volatility and ultimate value to society. Was it still just a speculative fad…
More than 122 million lives saved. Hundreds of millions people lifted out of extreme poverty. Over the course of its existence, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has helped drive massive positive outcomes like that by focusing on what it calls “actionable measurement” – aka a commitment to collecting and analyzing data about its activities and interventions, and then…
In Silicon Valley, intelligence is both abundant and coveted. Because of this fact, Silicon Valley job interview questions have gotten tougher — and weirder — as interviewers devise queries designed to identify the best of the brightest. Consider, these brainteasers that various companies have asked job candidates in recent years: How many golf balls can…
The Utopian Vision of AI In the late 1800s, in what’s known as the Second Industrial Revolution, multiple major new technologies initiated an era marked by even more rapid transformation than the century that preceded it — especially in the United States. Electrification, railroads, telegraphs, and eventually the automobile all helped unleash unprecedented productivity gains,…