Reid Hoffman

Reid Hoffman (born 1967) is an American entrepreneur and investor: a member of the “PayPal mafia,” co-founder of LinkedIn, and a longtime partner at Greylock. He was among the earliest backers of OpenAI, later co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleyman, and has spent the ChatGPT era as perhaps the most prolific public advocate for an optimistic AI future.

Bloomer-in-chief

In 2023 he published Impromptu, billed as the first book co-written with GPT-4. His 2025 book Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future (with Greg Beato) sorts the debate into doomers, gloomers, zoomers, and “bloomers” — his own camp, which holds that AI guided by smart risk-taking rather than blind risk-taking becomes an overwhelmingly positive force. Superagency, in his telling, is what happens when millions of people get superpowers at once: everyone benefits, including those who never touch the tools.

Hoffman practices what he preaches to an unusual degree. He created “Reid AI,” a video-and-voice digital twin trained on his books and speeches, and interviews it on stage to demystify the technology. Unlike the accelerationist wing, he says he is positive on intelligent regulation and frames iterative deployment — shipping, learning, correcting — as the mechanism by which innovation produces safety. Critics note that he is deeply invested in the outcome he predicts, and that his sunny framing can gloss over displaced workers; his answer is that the transition is real but navigable, asking whether we can manage it “with more grace.”