This transcript is generated with the help of AI and is lightly edited for clarity.
REID:
I’m Reid Hoffman.
ARIA:
And I’m Aria Finger.
REID:
We want to know what happens, if in the future, everything breaks humanity’s way.
ARIA:
Typically, we ask our guests for their outlook on the best possible future. But now, every other week, I get to ask Reid for his take.
REID:
This is Possible.
ARIA:
So Reid, in our conversation with an entrepreneur that we both admire, Devshi Mehrotra, we talked about how and why her startup, JusticeText, designs AI tools that are helping public defenders with insane caseloads and helping them better serve their clients. So on this note of how AI can be used to help reshape and reframe public systems that are overburdened at best and perhaps broken at worst, what are other specific public sector spaces where you think that AI can have an immediate impact right now?
REID:
I think the answer is a huge number. We could do an entire podcast, or even series, on all of the different areas. You know, and there’s a number of different organizations. There’s Code for America, which is doing things to try to provide essential services. There’s companies like Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins’ Promise, kind of doing a financial systems management and having a really good business model that aligns a business model for elevating the cases of these under-resourced communities. And those are just examples within what we know. There’s obviously tons of stuff within education, legal, medical, economic, justice, all of these areas. It’s one of the reasons why public service technology is really important. And then AI, the revolution it’s bringing, is a natural language interface together with a depth of knowledge to help bring these kind of intelligence and cognitive tools from everything from an individual community member to cases, like with Devshi, public defenders who are doing an important, critical role in our society to make sure that innocent people don’t get convicted and that people’s rights are respected. You know, even if in the case where, for example, you know, you might have some weed in the trunk, but the way that they, that weed is discovered, the importance is how the rights play, because rights aren’t just for wealthy people. They’re for all people.
ARIA:
And it’s interesting, you know, one of the things that Devshi said last week was that you don’t always even need the cutting-edge technology to make government work better. Like obviously we want the, you know, the best of the best to be working in our government, but sometimes there’s actually simple technologies that can make things a lot better. And I’ve heard you say many times, like one of the things we need is more folks in government to just have technology experience to understand it, to maybe have a stint in the private sector, to be schooled in it, to have education. Like that can go a long way, if we just have folks who understand and appreciate what technology can do for us. And so it was interesting, hearing about her background. I mean, she had interned stints at Microsoft Research and DeepMind, Peking University, Stanford Law. Like, I imagine your answer is probably gonna be both, but do you see more sort of generational founders in the AI space coming from the private sector, academia, both? How do you see those interplay?
REID:
Well, I think we wanna figure out how to enable as much, you know, kind of technological knowledge in government and public service as we can. You know, basically technology is transforming the landscape of what’s possible. Technology enables what can happen at scale, and society is always scale. So whether it’s government officials making decisions, and making intelligent decisions about how technology does this, whether it’s—a lot of technology deployment happens within private sectors. So the knowledge of, like, scale software systems like AI and, and that kind of application. A lot of new inventions and kind of, you know, looking at the world sideways or depth of research conditions come from universities, which also specifically train people to kind of have the skills for, you know, kind of modern work, modern industry you know, modern society. And, and so the short answer is we’re gonna need all of it.
REID:
And you can’t just do universities because, for example, like with AI, a lot of the kind of the in-depth AI revolution is coming from corporations because they are our best technology in the entire world, in every society in the world, for how do you assemble a bunch of resources on a risky competitive adventure? And so the AI development is from there—more than universities, not zero from universities, but more as part of how it’s happening right now today. But also, of course, in the cases with like Devshi, you have young people who go, “I want to be dedicating my life to solving these kinds of public problems.” And she kind of got the experience within these research organizations, understand what it is, and then immediately went into entrepreneurship, creating the product and business and sustaining institutions that are new businesses in order to make it happen.
REID:
So in some sense, she’s a little bit more from academia than from industry as a way of doing this, but you need that kind of useful energy as well. And we are so far behind on how it is we, we get technology into the public sphere, in part because people, you know, kind of overly go, “the public sphere must be completely separate from the corporate sphere.” And actually, in fact, figuring out new ways of public-private partnerships, I think are gonna really be key. And obviously there’s challenges to navigate. Like, you don’t wanna have the corruption of having public coffers go into private industry where all it is, is not the solving the problem, but it’s just capturing of a sales channel versus the solving of a societal need. And you have to worry about that kind of stuff in, in these things. But because the scale technology is essentially only built within the private sphere, especially within a bunch of what’s going on in AI, we need that to align good public-private missions. And of course I think we do that as well.
ARIA:
So zooming out to the AI space more broadly—speaking of that, that private industry that can have the capital and resources to do big things—not too long ago, as everyone knows, OpenAI raised what I think was the largest venture capital deal of all time. They raised $6.6 billion. And what do we think about this? Is this an anomaly? What does this mean for the AI space? And do you think we’re gonna see more funding rounds of this magnitude in the future?
REID:
Well, I think it’s unique because it’s a particular path by which OpenAI stays to a nonprofit mission, starts as a nonprofit, scales a company that’s a public benefit corp for navigating these particular things and is focused on AI for the benefit of humanity. And so it’s a first, but it’s probably not a first that will never be repeated. Because part of what happens as we get to this kind of globally connected role, as we do see all throughout the entire venture industry, venture capital round scaling. When I started my own career, you know, kind of a couple hundred thousand dollars seed round was, was like a big deal. And now, you know, seed rounds can be even tens of millions of dollars, right, in some cases. And then we, of course, we get to—as the whole venture industry also scales out – we have more entrepreneurs like Devshi, Phaedra, others who are like, “how do we make the business models work for the scaling of the impact?”
REID:
And that it runs as a company, but runs as a company that fits into a critical part of improving societal infrastructure that helps the kind of lower-income communities navigate life better, potentially have a better opportunity at the American dream for improving themselves because they have a more stable basis and are a more integrated part of society. And, you know, in Devshi’s case, the rights that come with that. In Phaedra’s case, the financial management. And so I think that we’ll see all of this happen. But now to the AI thing, I think we’re just at the beginning of the what AI will mean for society, for work, for individuals’ lives. And I think that these financing rounds—we’re not at market peak, we’re at market beginning.
ARIA:
Well, so, question about that. Obviously, the folks who are building their own models, training and creating their own models, like, you know, OpenAI, are raising these, you know, eye-popping rounds. Twenty years ago, people would be like, “What is going on?” But I feel like a lot of other people say that because, you know, AI can enhance what a company can do, you know, a company can do so much more with five people or 10 people—they’re not gonna need as much money to scale. Do you also see in a way that maybe some companies will be raising less or, or no venture capital at all because they don’t need it? Like, do you see in some ways it’s gonna be less? Or no, you think that it’s just gonna continue the trend of raising more and more dollars?
REID:
Well, I think there will be a range. So sometimes there will be smaller rounds, but I don’t think AI–even though it’s kind of provisioned by, you know, Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, kind of the hyperscalers in these–it doesn’t just, it will enable certain things to be cheaper, but just like, for example, you know, it used to be you have to, would buy, have to buy – and many of our listeners may not even know what this is – a whole bunch of very expensive sun equipment in order to do server stuff. Now you can use the cloud. It’s much cheaper and more dynamic infrastructure. But that still means that you need to like raise a bunch of money to realize your market opportunity, hire people. It’s a competitive thing frequently between company one, company two, company three. Capital is part of the competition. So I think broadly speaking, we do get to larger and larger capital raises within a more globally connected market, a more globally competitive market, et cetera. And as people realize that massive returns are possible, more capital flows in. And so AI’s transformation of every industry will mean that more capital is flowing in that people will then deploy to get the market blitzscaling more quickly, et cetera. So it doesn’t lead to smaller capital allocations.
REID:
Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network. It’s hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sara Schleede, and Paloma Moreno Jiménez. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.
ARIA:
Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, Ben Relles, Parth Patil, and Little Monster Media Company.