Reid Hoffman & Inflection AI’s Sean White on designing AI that makes us better humans

Hey, folks. Jeff Berman here. We have something very special for you today, a fireside chat between longtime innovators and friends, both of each other's and of mine, our very own Reid Hoffman and Inflection CEO, doctor Sean White. This conversation was presented by Inflection and recorded live at the twenty twenty five Masters of Scale Summit. I hope you enjoy it. One of the things we're running into that's gonna have a serious problem are gonna be mistaking AI for friends. Right? How do we get psychologically misled by the magic of these tools, devices, agents, companions, etcetera? So what do you think some of the really important things are relative to human psychology and interaction that should be design principles about this agentic universe that we're rushing into? I love this topic because I think it's really important, right? I'm sure that every one of, you out here has at some point used your first chatbot and felt, wow, that feels human like, that feels really real, that sort of magical experience. And I think we wanna keep that by the way. I think that is actually part of it being a really good interface. At the same time, you want it to be transparent. Right? And so you shouldn't feel bad about this. Your brains are built to recognize people in things. There are whole psychological conditions where you'll see, faces in trees and other objects. There's a field of study called Captology that was part of human computer interaction as well that BJ Fogg had sort of created, which was noticing that we applied some of the same social rules to computers that we did to individuals, right? If this computer was really kind of critical, sometimes we think that's smarter, and so we think, ah, that computer is smarter than this other one. And so in terms of principles, the number one is transparency. That is always knowing that there is an AI present where the AI is present, not pretending that it is human or sentient or some other thing. Right? Or conscious. Or conscious. That's right. There are some other design principles in here, though, that you wanna balance. Making sure that you have a good interface. Right? So you and I have empathy as humans. Right? And you want those systems to act that way. But if it starts leading down a path where it's clear that the human is actually going down a bad path, an unhealthy path, being clear on that as well. That's a design decision, and so maybe a last one to think about is actually starting off by thinking about this as prosocial. Well, I think it's interesting to have a goal post. Everything starts in design principles by saying what are you trying to do? If you try and aim for AGI, if you're gonna build AGI. If you try and build great tools for humans, you will build great tools for humans. And so say …