Inside Silicon Valley’s Most Important Conversations

Talking AI at Reid Hoffman's Masters of Scale Summit

October 24, 2024

Instead of publishing a new installment of Dan Shipper’s column Chain of Thought, Rhea Purohit filed this dispatch from Reid Hoffman’s Masters of Scale conference in San Francisco. Dan was also out west, to interview Anthropic president and cofounder Daniela Amodie and investor Sarah Guo at the Make with Notion conference. Stay tuned for an upcoming episode of AI & I with Notion cofounder Simon Last.—Kate Lee

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Before Reid Hoffman asks a question, he closes his eyes.

His jaw tenses, and with his eyes still shut, he begins to speak, slowly.

Hoffman was interviewing Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman about some of the biggest questions in artificial intelligence on stage at the Masters of Scale Summit.

As I sat under dimmed theater lights, I couldn’t help but feel like I was privy to a private conversation, a common feeling throughout the summit, which ran from October 22–24 at the Presidio Theatre in San Francisco.

Hoffman, Suleyman, and other industry experts spent the three-day event discussing and debating the technology shaping our future. Here’s how they answered some of the most important questions of the day.

How do we know that AI isn’t a fad?

All too often, Silicon Valley is afflicted with “shiny object syndrome,” according to Bret Taylor, who previously served as CEO of Salesforce and chaired Twitter’s board of directors. He’s now a board member at OpenAI and co-founder of the AI assistant Sierra. There are so many new ideas, he told Hoffman, it’s only natural for some of them to fade away.

Some skeptics believe that the AI boom is reminiscent of hype cycles of the past, often drawing parallels with the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. Rather than defending AI as fundamentally different from previous waves of technology, Taylor pointed to the dot-com boom as validation. That period, despite its excesses, produced companies like Amazon and Google that dominate the industry to this day.