Live with Tim O’Reilly: A Conversation with Entrepreneur Reid Hoffman

It’s back-to-school season in the US, and that means colleges have filled with students pondering their futures. And as Ian Bogost recently pointed out on X (and in The Atlantic), “This year's rising seniors have never experienced a year of college without generative AI.” While countless think pieces have been written about how AI has upended education, students’ familiarity with AI will ultimately give them an edge in the job market, says Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn, Manas AI, and Inflection AI and an investor at Greylock.

In a thread he posted to X and Instagram at the end of the last school year (which he also expanded into an article in The San Francisco Standard), Reid offered some advice to new graduates that’s worth revisiting. “College grads (and startups, for that matter) almost always enjoy an advantage over their senior leaders when it comes to adopting new technology,” he argues. “If you’re a recent graduate, I urge you not to think in terms of AI-proofing your career. Instead, AI-optimize it.” On this episode of Live with Tim O’Reilly, Reid and I will get into just what that means.

It’s not just good advice for students. In our rocky job market, and as companies across industries scrutinize their teams to determine where AI can provide value (many getting it wrong), it’s imperative that employees engage with AI in the workplace. You may have seen the viral stat from a recent MIT study claiming that “95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing.” As the study’s lead author, Aditya Challapally, noted in Fortune, the obstacle to those companies’ success is “not the quality of the AI models”; it’s “the ‘learning gap’ for both tools and organizations.” Which brings us back to Reid’s advice: “The more you understand what employers are hiring for”—or are focused on, if you’re a current employee—“the more you’ll understand how you can get ahead in this new world.”

We touch on what it takes to succeed in an “AI-mediated world” and the human qualities that will remain important (perhaps even moreso)—with examples drawn from Reid’s book Superagency and his podcast Possible (with cohost Aria Finger), both of which cover how technology can help us get to the “brightest version of the future.” As Reid put it in his X thread, “When new technology starts cresting, the best move is to surf that wave.” Surf’s up.

Recommended prep or follow-up:

• Watch Tim O’Reilly and Reid Hoffman on Deepfakes, AI, and the American Economy (video)