To be fair, this isn’t obvious from the top comment. Another comment literally argues for shutting them out [1].
One is normative: listen to tech CEO's if you want to predict what will happen.
Another is positive: let CEO's tell you what ought to happen.
What happened here was the original commenter talked about listening to Reid for normative reason but the conversation got derailed into ignoring CEO's for positive statements.
This is something I see often where one talks about what would happen but people barge in to signal their ethics and morals instead.
If you ask an AWS consultant what the best solution for your problem is, don't be surprised if the answer is AWS.
Not every human on social media or talking to the press is trying to influence others in a survival situation. Go touch grass.
Yes to make money so they can provide a roof and food for their families.
But also other goals. To invent. To create. To provide goods and services.
People lie.
There’s an argument that the best approach is to totally ignore what the vendor says and listen to trusted experts instead. If you’re buying a car, say, you’re probably not listening to what car manufacturers say. Or, at least, you shouldn’t; you will be mislead. If you happen to be an expert on cars it might be no harm, but otherwise probably best ignore them.
The information content of this is rather minimal. Even if everything he says is literally true it's hard to tell through the massive, massive vested interest he has.
And it doesn't help that...
'Hoffman, who is an investor in both Anthropic and OpenAI, pushed back firmly on the narrative that the two companies are in a zero-sum race. “We tend to want to tell these stories as cage matches,” he said, as in two companies enter and only one leaves, but “in fact,” he claimed, “there’s a lot of room for both of them to win incredibly.'
that's clearly a very self-interested gloss on the flip side of the situation. Yes, that's in the possibility space. No, I would not consider "both companies do fantastically for many many years" as a terribly large part of the possibility space. Look to all of the many past instances of industries starting up. It is a very common case that if you take the two early leaders you aren't looking at who is going to be the two biggest companies in 10 or 20 years. It is in fact a common case that neither of those companies are the leaders in 10 or 20 years. The sheer staggering size of the AI training moat at the current time may lock in the possibility that no other business could possibly overtake them... but what if somebody solves that massive training gap? It probably isn't mathematically fundamental; I can't help but observe that humans do not get to their level of capability by pouring the entire Internet through their head several times.
He probably does know a lot of things most of us don't know, but I doubt he's sharing very many of them in this article. This is just trash talk.
But then I'd say I don't understand the valuations of a lot of companies right now. It seems to me the stock market has written into its structure the idea that United States companies will be claiming something like 500-1000% of all TAMs in the entire world in the next 10-20 years, which seems unlikely to be the case. SpaceX's claimed TAM of "pretty much the entire United States GDP, you know, why not" is merely the most blatant instance of this.
I'm not defending SpaceX or xAI. Billionaires don't need my help. But this article is still pretty pointless. Hoffman isn't a dispassionate observer, he's one of the players. Of course he's telling everyone he's going to win and the other guy is going to lose. Even when a coach is completely objectively correct when he says in his pre-game press conference that he has every confidence that his team will win in the end, it's still an information-free statement.
Why not? The guy with probably one of the largest incentives in the world to NOT trash xAI was trashing xAI.
Which is ironic, because Reid was a friend of Epstein and visited his island.
He's just stating the obvious, so I really don't see this as contentious.
xAI is irrelevant. It's so irrelevant that after being relegated hardware from Tesla, then pushed into Twitter to try to make that have value, then pushed into SpaceX because Elon Musk somehow gets away with hilarious levels of securities fraud, now it's basically reduced to renting out hardware.
Yes, xAI is irrelevant, and Hoffman is just pointing out the blatantly obvious. Its only value is in renting out hardware that can be better used by more capable orgs. It is basically a scalper that happened to get loads of nvidia hardware pre-orders in just before the AI run-up, and the entire SPCX scam relies upon everyone trying to buy usage of it.
Saying they aren’t relevant is comical
In porn and deepfakes. Yeah, they should be regulated to obliteration.
>they own cursor which has a good percent of the coding market
They don't own cursor. They announced an acquisition immediately after the insane SPCX valuation to desperately scrabble to lock in some of that laughably nonsensical hype valuation (as the entire US equities market has become firmly detached from reality, and at some point is going to catastrophically crash to reality). It doesn't close for months. And FWIW Cursor is rapidly declining, and anyone still foolishly on it should probably find an offramp now. Before Elon Musk starts fiddling with it and you find your code focused on the genocides of whites in South Africa or something.
I mean, the fact that you had to cite that as their credibility fully demonstrates how completely worthless it is. GPUs that were originally Tesla's (before the whole robo-taxi scam fell apart), then shuffled to Twitter, then to SPCX.
>Anthropic runs thier ai on xai’s data centers
That was literally the foundation of my comment. xAI is so worthless that they get better value become another vanilla rent-a-GPU operation.
xAI is a joke. Somehow Elon's pathetic Matryoshka doll routine keeps suckering fools.
Yep. I switched to Zed over the weekend and I’m very happy so far. It’s snappy.
Getting 15 billion a year in payments for their cluster is hardly “another rent a gpu” operation. It seems mostly your post is motivated by hatred rather than any sort of reality
Trash talk is Musk's entire M.O., so that seems like a good way to proceed in 2026.
He is connected and gives money to people - why should that mean anyone should listen to him about any of this. He's not actually a do-er is he?
Is there something I am missing? The amount of coverage he gets seems massively disproportionate to his skill, talent and insight.
Thats why. Not that we should listen to him (no clue who exactly he is) but thats why he gets attention.
this is also known as influence so..
This comment thread is bonkers. I've never seen stuff like this on HN before!
What does this actually mean? I’ve always taken this use of relevance as an influencer metric.
The answer seems to be "we don't, he's on the board of a competiting AI company"
That seems like a good reason to listen to him? He is prominently placed in the field. Has a lot to lose by knowingly making false statements in public about a competitor. And has an incentive (and the resources with which) to dig deeply into them in a way e.g. a trash-talking YouTuber does not.
He has his set of biases. But Board member at a multi-trillion dollar established software and AI kingmaker seems like a weird way to dismiss an opinion.
No he isn't. He's the LinkedIn guy. That's his only success. Good for him but the LinkedIn founder doesn't know anything baout AI.
> Has a lot to lose by knowingly making false statements in public about a competitor.
The article ignores the conflict of interest - Hoffman is introduced as:
> Reid Hoffman has watched the AI industry from virtually every vantage point—as a founder, a lead investor and as a decade-long Microsoft board member.
they don't say:
"Reid invested in both OpenAI and Anthropic" which seems to indicate that Fortune think they can get away with lying through omission.
https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1ccol5y/reid_h...
The interviews are not real-time and are heavily edited, of course, but he's probably one of the few tech execs who've spent so much money and time to personally explore AI.
However it is probably known more (if at all) for being the company Microsoft "Windsurfed" by licensing all its tech and poaching its leadership team, including the dude who's the current "CEO of AI" at MSFT.
Remember prepared statements can be written by smarter people. Ask him to speak extemporaneously and find out how stupid he really is.
He's in the Epstein files as an island visitor?
He's a sleazy guy. From Wikipedia (which leans left):
> He funded a group involved in Project Birmingham (a 2017 Alabama Senate race disinformation effort using fake Facebook pages and tactics mimicking Russian interference to hurt Roy Moore). He later apologized, saying he wasn't aware of the specific methods.
He co-founded linkedin a platform every one knows.
Elon Musk invented the Cybertruck and has a weird cult following through Tesla.
i mean Elon Musk called some of his kids this:
X Æ A-Xii Musk, Exa Dark Sideræl Musk and Techno Mechanicus Musk
What opinion should i give more value?
That alone should be justifiable cause for exile from society.
And if they ever send me something interesting, i still could apply.
When I was a child my brother taught me to always consider the incentives, especially the monetary ones, of a speaker. 'Follow the money'. So, in this case neither Musk nor Hoffman would get much traction with me as both of them are incentivized to form a pro or con opinion of xAI.
Together with all his wins and fails, it clearly shows that Elon Musk not an genius but more lucky opportunist. For sure not an idiot of course.
Follow the money is for sure a good point though
The valuation of SpaceX is due to AI, namely the revenue they get for renting out their GPUs to companies that actually have AI customers, as their own AI tech has not panned out.
For the large number of companies rolled into SpaceX, they are all failed attempts to grow large enough to justify their valuations, and when a company fails to do that it just gets rolled into the conglomerate as a way of hiding the failure.
Tesla's valuation contrasted with its performance means that Tesla will likely be rolled into whatever latest vehicle of Musk's has the most attention, hiding the failure of Tesla to come anywhere near to its promises.
Renting them out for 90 days!
It's never going to be cost effective to send anything back down the gravity well, which means that the only way Musk's plan leads anywhere is if he's able to bootstrap an entirely self contained, self perpetrating economy in space. That's not happening in five years.
Edit: and no, data centres in space are not the answer.
Star Link is the main thing which increased the payload to space significantly.
Star Link only has 10 million customers and every few minutes a satellite handover is happening which makes it hard to use for video call (was my experience at a friend's house)
While this business is paying of right now others will get into it too and destroying SpaceX margin (china etc)
Now what else on payload is there? Ah yes Datacenter.
It would take 300-400 Sparship launches alone to get a current 200-300Mwh DC into space alone.
Starship doesn't deliver yet what it needs to be able to do. Neither on payload side nor on cost reduction due to reuse.
A DC will be cheaper on earth for a long time as long as earth is as empty as it is especially for areas which are just dessert.
It would be a lot better long term investment to just build its own Datacenter city in the dessert as ai doesn't need that low of latency and use everything realtime in the other Datacenter we already have.
SpaceX Elon musk fantasy is 50-100 years to early.
You gonna wait so long?
There's legions of Republican maga affiliated red red red ultra-wealthy tech people, so having some exception on the other side to point to gives everyone a "both sides" way to take presumed affront.
Someone like Elon being asked for their opinion on tech - I kind of understand - was at least at the coal face of SpaceX and Tesla for a time, seemed to understand the tech and was not terrible when it came to direction.
Zuck I'd get, Bezos, Dario, Sam - but I don't actually get why Reid is always in the conversation - he's never been in front of anything