Reid Hoffman is a venture investor and technology executive who co-founded LinkedIn in 2002 (sold to Microsoft in 2016) and is a partner at Greylock Partners. He was a founding board member of OpenAI, leaving the board in early 2023 to avoid a conflict with his AI startup Inflection.ai, which he co-founded with Mustafa Suleyman and which was later absorbed by Microsoft. He is the author of two books on human–AI collaboration, Impromptu (2023) and Superagency (2025), and contributed the essay "Informational GPS" to Digitalist Papers Vol. 1.
Background and roles
Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn in 2002 and remained associated with the company through its 2016 acquisition by Microsoft. He is a partner at Greylock Partners.
He co-founded Inflection.ai in 2022 with Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan; most of the company's technical staff moved to Microsoft in 2024. Through the Microsoft acquisition of LinkedIn and the absorption of Inflection's talent, Hoffman maintains close institutional ties to Microsoft and often speaks as a Microsoft-adjacent voice.
Writing on AI
"Informational GPS" (Digitalist Papers Vol. 1)
In his essay for Digitalist Papers Vol. 1, Hoffman frames large language models as a decentralized, agency-enhancing public utility analogous to GPS. He notes that the 2000 civilian upgrade to GPS produced an estimated $1.4 trillion in economic benefits (NIST 2019), and argues that LLMs are to information what GPS is to location. Where GPS provides a single ground truth, Hoffman argues, LLMs navigate subjective "informational planets" shaped by their training data, parameters, and RLHF. His prescription is a multipolar LLM ecosystem with no single "source of truth," paired with individual agency as a design principle.
Impromptu (2023)
Impromptu was a book-length collaboration between a major technology executive and GPT-4, with Hoffman writing essays alongside GPT-4 output as a demonstration of human–AI thought partnership.
Superagency (2025, with Greg Beato)
Superagency, written with Greg Beato, extends Hoffman's argument for AI as a capability-amplifier. It frames the central tension of the AI era as one between "bloomers," who see AI as freedom-enhancing, and "doomers," who emphasize catastrophic risk, and advocates a middle path of optimistic engagement paired with active safety work.
Positions and statements
Across his writing, Hoffman argues that technology democratizes previously scarce capabilities when it is designed for individual-user agency. He is less concerned with regulatory containment than with design choices intended to preserve agency. He treats AI risk seriously but rejects what he terms "doomer" framing.
His positions differ from those of several other figures. His former Inflection co-founder Suleyman takes a more cautious posture in Suleyman's Containment argument, against which Hoffman's "Informational GPS" is more optimistic. Hoffman's individual-agency prescription overlaps substantially with Volokh's User Sovereignty argument, though the two differ on regulatory analysis.
Relationships
- supports: The Digitalist Papers (Stanford, Volumes 1–2) — his essay.
- supports: User Sovereignty Model vs. Public Safety / Social Justice Model — partial alignment on individual-agency prescription.
- related: Mustafa Suleyman — Inflection co-founder.
- related: OpenAI — former board member.
- related: Microsoft — close institutional ties.