The Ledger, every show
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks, across all 44 shows. Pick shows below, then mix any filter with any other.
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every show 44 of 44
Hoffman: Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Palestine
“I gone and argued against a lot of kind of lefties who are like saying, look, the only, like, for example, they say, you know, Israel is committing genocide against Palestine. You're like, no, it's not. Genocide is something different. You could say there's ci…”
Hoffman: Trump abused state power for personal gain in first term
“Even in the first administration, there was the, there were some abuses of instruments of state for personal gain, for personal power. And that is, I think anti the spirit of anything in democracy, anti the spirit of anything in American.”
Hoffman: Buying Truth Social stock or crypto enables foreign political corruption
“What if foreign actors, Russia, others, were transferring economics to people with political power in order to influence the U.S. And what they're doing? You know, easy ways to do that are like, you know, buy true social stock. Easy ways to do that are buy fre…”
Hoffman: Medicare should eliminate public spending on end-of-life care
“And you go, well, look, there's a whole bunch of money that's spent on these last three to six months of life. Let's reduce the spending on that and say that is not a public, you know, a public expense. And let's increase, like, for example, preventative and o…”
ByteDance Will Delay TikTok Action Until After the US Presidential Election
“Likely, and I have no inside information here, I think ByteDance waits for the election, because they presume that Trump could get bought off by investors since, you know, he's a coin-operated person in his entire life, not just as in his presidency.”
Hoffman: Elon Musk's AI Pause Petition Was Intellectually Dishonest
“Well, Elon's in particular was signing this six month pause letter while trying to hire people and buy as much compute and get going as fast as possible. Everyone else slow down so I can catch up. That's not intellectually honest.”
Hoffman: Slashing university funding and barring foreign students would be catastrophic
“So, for example, you could do the current way of how you're attacking Harvard and say, I'm gonna withdraw funding, I'm going to disallow international students for coming, I'm gonna, like, do a whole bunch of other things which are gonna cause a lot of damage,…”
Hoffman: Most government tech procurement RFPs produce broken, quickly outdated software
“It's one of the reasons why, you know, most governments around the world have really broken RFP solutions for technology because they go, oh, I will specify the 150 requirements. And then when whoever provider Usually pretty incompetent people, you know, kind …”
Hoffman: OpenAI meant open API access, not open source models
“In terms of being open, there's lots of different parameters of open, and open AI has been, you know, working to have, like, open, you know, kind of you know, with, obviously, identity and registration for safety, but open AI, API access. It wasn't called open…”
Hoffman: Elon Musk approved OpenAI's closed-model strategy as co-CEO
“Elon was part of that decision for you know, as kind of co-CEO in terms of making that decision. And so that's how open AI has always operated.”
Hoffman: FTC Chair Lina Khan's tech M&A crackdown concentrates Big Tech power
“You know, she misunderstands, like, kind of the role of how to stop the aggregation of power in large tech companies, because she says, well, if she stops large tech companies from buying small startups, what that means is venture capitalists, like myself, and…”
Hoffman: Trade wars will cause a massive drop in U.S. prosperity
“The trade wars will create a massive drop in prosperity in the U.S.”
Hoffman: DOGE has zero chance of cutting $2T without defense cuts
“There is next to zero chance that the missions that they have declared will be successful because the only way to get two trillion out of the budget would be to massively reduce the deficit and reduce defense spending.”
Hoffman: China uses subsidies as mercantile warfare to destroy Western competition
“You're actually, in fact, trying to destroy our industry in the short term so that you can then raise prices later and capture it. That is mercantile warfare. Responding to mercantile warfare is completely fine.”
Hoffman: Prioritizing 'woke AI' is silly and misses AI's real stakes
“Now, the challenges would be is, what if he goes, no, no, the most important issue facing AI is woke AI. Because we have this calling card, which means a whole bunch of different kind of, You know, like, you know, these people are evil and terrible. That's sil…”
Hoffman: US should stop building aircraft carriers vulnerable to $2M hypersonic missiles
“We should not be building aircraft carriers. Aircraft carriers themselves cost billions, The planes on them are more billions. They put, you know, thousands of American lives on them, and in the modern world, you have to, like, sure, an aircraft carrier is gre…”
Hoffman: U.S. Should Ban TikTok Based on Commercial Reciprocity
“The right way, I think, to think about this from an American or any other perspective is to say China bans Competition in China from Meta, Twitter, etc. And so the right way to say is like, look, if you're banning our companies, we should ban yours. Commercial…”
Hoffman: Elon Musk's greatest strength and weakness stem from blind conviction
“Elon has a conviction that he, what he believes is true is absolutely true even when all of the evidence is against his belief, right? And so that allows him to do, I can see that we can colonize Mars, and here we go. Right? And that creates, you know, SpaceX,…”
Hoffman: Distinguish freedom of speech from freedom of reach in media
“The importance of freedom of speech, there's a really interesting distinction between freedom of speech and freedom of reach, right? So, if you're standing at the local corner, and standing on a soapbox, and saying, the moon is made out of blue cheese, and the…”
Hoffman: Media platforms should attach expert determinations to false claims
“Look, if I could, through a democratic process, because I believe in democracies, I believe in collective governance, get our society to agree to say, hey, what we should do is identify some topics that panels of experts can yield To a truth determination on. …”
Hoffman: Blocking tech acquisitions entrenches monopolies by deterring startup funding
“If you want competition with those large companies from startups, Investors, say for example, I'm an investor who's gonna put a billion dollars into a company that might compete with one of the large tech companies. I'm only gonna put the billion dollars in if…”
Reid Hoffman: Twitter is substantially worse post-Elon Musk acquisition
“With deep regret, I would say substantially worse.”
Hoffman predicts Bitcoin will approach $200,000 by the end of 2025
“I would say end of 25, so I'm approaching 200,000.”
Hoffman: An AI GP as good as an average doctor is months away
“We could construct in a small number of months a medical assistant that is as capable as kind of call it You know an average GP or better that could run for, you know, small number of dollars per hour.”
Elon Musk's lawsuits against OpenAI are driven by sour grapes
“Frankly, I think probably the most charitable thing to say is sour grapes because, you know, for example, I know Sam offered him as much of the investment round as he wanted. Right? Like, he could have done the whole thing. He could have let it. You know, it w…”
Synthetic data will make individual media training data irrelevant
“Don't try to hold out for money on the training side of things, because, you know, we're going to create synthetic data, we're going to do all kinds of other things that are going to mean that no one's particular data is really going to matter.”
Hoffman: FTC blocking tech M&A quells venture capital investment
“Her theory is you gotta prevent the aggregation of power, so you gotta fight every acquisition of note. And the problem, of course, is that actually quells venture capital investment.”
Hoffman funded ads highlighting RFK Jr.'s anti-vax stance to hurt Trump
“My thing was actually, in fact, making people aware of RFK's anti-vax, you know, statement, his anti-science stuff, because I thought that would be relevant in the polls in November. That, that was the actual strategy that, that I believe, and I think that wou…”
Reid Hoffman calls proposed unrealized capital gains tax definitely stupid
“Look, I think it's definitely a quelling impact, and it's definitely stupid, and definitely shouldn't happen.”
Reid Hoffman funded E. Jean Carroll's civil lawsuit against Donald Trump
“What I funded was an ability to have, you know, kind of a woman who doesn't have power, who's being threatened by a rich man with a lot of money and power to try to silence her, to have her day in court where 12 everyday Americans, right, can come to a judgmen…”
Massive Tech Incumbents Funding Risky AI Projects Benefits Society
“And that actually is a feature, not a bug. Like part of the benefit you have is take this AI revolution we're in. Like it's because you have these large companies that can invest in multi-year risky projects that can create things that are massively valuable f…”
Microsoft Board Approved $1B for OpenAI Despite Having No Clear Product
“The very first OpenAI Microsoft deal was, you know, Satya and Kevin Scott brought to the Microsoft board. We want to put a billion dollars into the investment in this vehicle. From a five one C three that doesn't really have any particular plans at making its …”
Hoffman Offered to Cover OpenAI Salaries When Elon Musk Departed
“When Elon had announced to the company that he was leaving and not financing it anymore, and, you know, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, Sam called me, and I said, look, I'll cover the salaries, and on, and he asked me if he joined the board, and I said, yes, …”
Sam Altman Over-Indexed on AI Safety Advocates for OpenAI's Board
“I think he was making too much of a AI safety, you know, kind of, who are the most AI safety people, make sure they're on the board.”
Hoffman: Open-sourcing AI tools hands election interference tech to North Korea
“You know, when you open source tools, well, all those tools, once you open source, you know, you might as well just, you know, ship it right over to North Korea to say, interfere away.”
Reid Hoffman: Calls for a Global Six-Month AI Pause Cannot Work
“You don't set up a flare and say, everyone should pause for six months. Oh, look, eight billion people paused. On your theory of the universe, the UN would be a highly functioning organization that we would all use for a whole bunch of things. It doesn't work.”
Hoffman: AI Improves Humanity's Overall Risk Portfolio Against Pandemics and Climate
“When you get to pandemic, maybe the only way to solve pandemic is AI. Well, a certain help for climate is AI. It's net, I think, strongly in the positive column. It doesn't to say that it might not add some existential risk characteristics to the overall portf…”
Hoffman: AI cannot be built by UN committees, academics lack building experience
“And you just can't have AI built by UN committee. It just doesn't exist. And it's one of the things that academics mostly don't understand because they've never, most of them, not all, of course, but most have never built anything, don't really understand how …”
Hoffman: Intense AI regulation enshrines the past and harms humanity
“Generally speaking, regulation is enshrining the past against the future, and if you look at every industry that goes really intense in regulation, it's, it slows down intensely on innovation, and if you say, well, that's what we should be doing in AI, it's li…”
Hoffman: GPT-4 is already superintelligent due to breadth across domains
“We already have super intelligence. GBD-IV is super intelligent. That doesn't mean, for example, if you say, okay, GBD-IV, tell Reid Hoffman how to better invest in artificial intelligence or craft good artificial intelligence that'll say anything that the exp…”
Hoffman: GPT-4 already diagnoses better than majority of human GPs
“And for example, a researcher at Microsoft, again, Peter Lee, has written an excellent book about showing how GPT-IV can already do medical diagnoses better than, you know, the majority of human GPs.”
Hoffman: Framing AI primarily as an existential threat is naive
“And one of the things I think is naive about that statement and the reason I didn't sign it is because while it can be an existential risk, just like, you know, for example, you create nuclear power and nuclear weapons or an existential risk, it is also one of…”
Hoffman: The Six-Month AI Pause Letter Is 'Laughable' and Wrong
“Most of the folks who go concerns, go everything from the relatively laughable and silly six-month pause letter, which is kind of like wrong in its theory of human nature, wrong in its theory of technological development, wrong in its theory, like, just kind o…”
Hoffman: Obsessing Over Robot Overlords Increases the Likelihood of Dystopia
“One of the places where the most of the existential risk people are doing a disservice and causing an increased likelihood of dystopia is that by focusing on kind of future robot overlords versus how human beings use this technology, Including, by the way, cri…”
Hoffman: Governments Attempting to Slow Big Tech AI Are Misguided
“If you listen to the press and listen to the committees of people that are like, oh, we should slow these big tech companies down. It's like, well, actually, in fact, That's a bad participation because we have line of sight to a medical assistant, a tutor, you…”
Hoffman: Proposing a six-month AI pause is like refusing word processors
“I'm hearing a whole bunch of, we should have a six month pause. And I kind of don't understand that you have to learn these tools. It's kind of like saying, I'm going to be a writer and I'm not going to use a word processor. I'm going to be a graphic designer …”