The News
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman said that AI is going to get unfair blame when it comes to negative outcomes in the economy.
“Just about everything is going to be blamed on AI,” Hoffman said in an interview aired Monday at Semafor World Economy in Washington, DC. “Like if you do the analysis of rising electricity costs, it has no correlation with the data centers, or even what is relatively modest AI usage so far. And yet all blame for increasing electricity prices today is AI.”
Hoffman, a billionaire investor who co-founded Manas AI and Inflection AI, added that the same could be applied for the difficulty recent college graduates are facing in the workforce.
He said “global turbulence,” including tariffs and military conflicts, have created uncertainty that is undermining those workers’ attempts at finding jobs. “But yet it’s all currently blamed to AI,” he said.
Hoffman urged the public to not be so skeptical of AI technology that their countries miss out on the “Cognitive Industrial Revolution.” He added: “And so you don’t want to be saying, ‘Hey, as opposed to being the England of the Industrial Revolution, we’re going to be the Poland of the Industrial Revolution.’”
Know More
Hoffman also reflected on the scandal surrounding disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and revelations that he and Epstein had deeper connections than previously acknowledged. Earlier this year, the Justice Department released a vast trove of documents that showed Hoffman had visited Epstein’s island in 2014, gave him gifts, and offered to help with bad publicity he was receiving at the time.
“I obviously feel enormously bad that it took me a few years to understand kind of what the monstrosity was,” Hoffman said at Semafor World Economy.
He echoed previous comments that he had relied on MIT’s vetting of Epstein, instead of conducting his own research, when boosting the school’s fundraising efforts.
“What I’ve been trying to do is get voices for the victims,” he said. “I funded their ads on football to kind of get Congress to release all of the Epstein files. And I’ve done other things that I don’t want to talk about a whole bunch because it’s about them, not about me.”