Here’s How LinkedIn Co-Founder Reid Hoffman Says AI Needs to Be Regulated

Regulation can be good for technology, so long as it’s done thoughtfully, according to LinkedIn co-founder, investor, and AI-enthusiast Reid Hoffman. Speaking on the heels of a pitch event in San Francisco called Entrepreneurs First Demo Day, he compared AI regulation to seatbelts in vehicles. “Seatbelts are a good thing, relative to the fact that regulatory stuff can have a positive impact on society, technology evolution. Now doing it smart in the right way is important,” he tells Inc. “You don’t try to solve everything before you get on the road. You get on the road and then solve it as you go,” he adds. His voice joins a chorus of others from big names in tech speaking up about how much—or in the case of legendary investor Marc Andreessen and companies like Meta—how little regulation they support. Hoffman sits on the board of Entrepreneurs First, an international talent investment firm that hosts incubator-style programs and related annual pitch competitions. Those events are called Demo Days, and the most recent took place in San Francisco on Wednesday. Hoffman joined EF’s board after leading a significant round of investment in the company in 2017 through his capacity at venture capital firm Greylock Partners. Hoffman was not on the ground at Demo Day this year, but another big name in tech was: Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark was the keynote speaker in conversation with Entrepreneurs First CEO Alice Bentinck. Just a few days prior, Clark had made waves for commentary he gave at The Curve conference in Berkeley, California, and later published in essay form in his newsletter. He compared AI to a “mysterious creature” of humanity’s own creation. He said he was optimistic about its potential as well as appropriately afraid of it, especially if AI’s goals are not absolutely aligned with humanity’s. And finally, he ended by emphasizing the need for conversations with a broad swathe of society to help craft a “policy solution.” “There will surely be some crisis,” Clark notes in his blog. “We must be ready to meet that moment both with policy ideas, and with a pre-existing transparency regime which has been built by listening and responding to people.” In response to the post, U.S. AI and crypto czar David Sacks accused Anthropic of fearmongering. Hoffman’s take, which he wrote about in his recent book, is by no means anti-regulation, but does differ somewhat from Clark’s. “In the book that I published in January, Superagency, part of what I was arguing for within AI is iterative deployment and development,” he tells Inc. “We do the regulatory thing, but we do it in response to what we can actually see versus imagination of what [could] happen,” he adds. AI has never been more topical, especially among aspiring entrepreneurs. This week at Demo Day in San Francisco, founders from 20 different startups pitched more than 200 tech investors, among them big name firms like a16z, Khosla Ventures, Paladin Capital, Insight Partners and Engine Ventures, in hopes of landing as much as $7 million in seed funding. It represented the culmination of some six months of work the founders had put in during Entrepreneurs First’s incubator-style program. On the lips of most of those entrepreneurs was AI. “The majority of the companies that were pitching yesterday—85 to 90 percent—are all using AI in some way. Some of them are building novel AI models, others are creating wrappers or scaffolding around existing AI models,” says Bentinck. “If you look at what early stage investors want to put capital behind, they see this enormous opportunity in the new AI economy.” Originally founded in London, Entrepreneurs First started off as a nonprofit in 2011 before becoming the investment vehicle it is today, starting in 2015. The company expanded overseas to offer programming in San Francisco at the start of 2024, and continues to run cohorts across Europe, India and the U.S. Entrepreneurs First functions something like an incubator, although Bentinck says EF thinks of itself more as a “talent investing studio.” It searches out individuals, usually with technical backgrounds, who also possess certain qualities related to pacing, productivity, determination, and even aggression, Bentinck says—qualities that alert EF that these individuals may outperform their peers. EF then guides them through the process of building a startup including helping them ideate if they don’t already have an idea and introducing them to potential co-founders. “We find exceptional individuals, pre-team, pre-idea, pre-company. Really all that we’re looking for is their entrepreneurial potential and then we run them through a process that helps them build a startup from scratch,” Bentinck says. The group that pitched this week included the top tier companies from EF’s European and U.S. programs. Each of these teams had been selected by EF and received $250,000 in pre-seed investment in exchange for 8 percent equity. “That’s the culmination of EF and we then send them off into the wild to build enormous companies,” Bentinck says. BY CHLOE AIELLO @CHLOBO_ILO