Inside Silicon Valley’s Most Important Conversations

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

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox.

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.

Taylor is confident that large language models are also transforming our lives. “It’s important not to be cynical—there will be a lot of snake oil, lots of people will lose money, lots of people will make money, and that’s the game of Silicon Valley,” he said. His belief in AI’s continued progress is grounded in its reliance on three factors—algorithms, data, and compute—each benefiting from the brightest minds in tech driving them forward. The three, crucially, can be developed independent of one another, creating multiple pathways for continued progress.

Is AI changing the way we think?

It’s scientifically proven that a reading habit can rewire your brain, molding neural pathways to boost memory, critical thinking, and empathy. It’s always fascinated me to consider that a single technology enabled this biological change at scale: the invention of the printing press. Invented by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440, the printing press allowed us to interact with information in a different way—through books. Five centuries later, books continue  to reshape the way we think.

In his interview with Hoffman, Suleyman—formerly of Google DeepMind and Inflection AI, the latter of which was (kind of) acquired by Microsoft this year—said that as AI becomes more sophisticated, having different ways to interact with the technology will unlock different parts of our minds. Now, if we have a question about the world and our phone is in easy reach, we type our query into a Google search box, Suleyman said, and we only have to wait for a fraction of a second as the search engine generates a list of possible answers. Suleyman believes that when searching the internet by speaking to an AI becomes the norm, our behaviors associated with search will change—including both how often we search and the way we do so. Suleyman’s comments align with Hoffman’s own theory of AI being a “cognitive GPS” to help us navigate our minds.

What does it mean to be human in the age of AI?

As a writer, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about what makes me different from AI. I’ve even written about the LLM I use to make sense of using AI in my writing—maximizing the meaning I get from the technology by using it for the parts of the creative process I don’t enjoy. As I question what it means to differentiate oneself in the age of AI, Astro Teller, who has the title “Captain of Moonshots” at Google’s X innovation lab, made me stop and reflect on why I was asking that question in the first place.

Teller told the audience that each time in human history that a discovery or invention has challenged our beliefs about ourselves, it “kerfuffles us.” Copernicus or Ptolemy—depending on whom you choose to credit—argued that the earth was not the center of the universe, and Charles Darwin put forth that we descended from primates. Teller believes that we feel insecure every time our uniqueness as a species might be undermined. “Society is hanging on with our fingernails to our sense of self and specialness,” he said. “We can get mad about it or we can think about whether we should be tying our sense of self to our sense of specialness.” 

What gives him meaning as a human being is being good, kind, and caring to those around him—and that’s something that AI doesn’t, and inherently cannot, undermine. In a similar vein, investor Vinod Khosla said in a separate interview that as AI becomes more advanced, we’ll have more room to focus on our own “humanness.”

Where business opportunities lie in the age of AI

Taylor described the AI market as having “echoes of the cloud market.” He said that players in the cloud market fall into three broad buckets: 

• Infrastructure giants like Microsoft and Amazon that provide foundational computing power; 
• Makers of tools to build that infrastructure, like Databricks and Snowflake; 
• Companies focused on specialized solutions like Salesforce, Adobe, and many others. 

He highlighted that at each level of the cloud market, the number of participants decreased—there were more tool makers than infrastructure giants, and more specialized solutions companies than tool makers.

The broader AI market is structured similarly: Few companies will build frontier models such as Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI, the barriers to entry being huge amounts of capital; a larger number will build tools to help us build AI software; and there will be an even greater number of companies building AI software because there is “infinite opportunity to build solutions to people’s problems.” He added that he is most excited by the innovation we will see in the last category of the market because it’ll have a direct impact on the way people lead their lives.

Overheard at Masters of Scale

Here are a few things I heard at the conference:

• “I’m the most prolific angel investor in AI.”—An invitee dressed in all-black as she introduced herself at lunch
• “As you talk to a human being, they’re already thinking about how they’ll respond to you. AI waits for you to finish.”—Anonymous
• “What is the story held by your spine?”—A spoken-word performer 
• “In 50 years, jobs might be as foreign to me as podcasting [would be] to Benjamin Franklin.”—Bret Taylor
• “Human institutions change more slowly than technologists expect them to.”—Reid Hoffman in response to a question about his most contrarian view on AI

Rhea Purohit is a contributing writer for Every focused on research-driven storytelling in tech. You can follow her on X at @RheaPurohit1 and on LinkedIn, and Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.

We also build AI tools for readers like you. Automate repeat writing with Spiral. Organize files automatically with Sparkle. Write something great with Lex.