Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

https://fortune.com/2026/06/24/reid-hoffman-spacex-musk-openai-anthropic-gen-z-mistake/

by 1vuio0pswjnm7 • 28 days ago

236 254 28 days ago

"The pitch deck, he revealed, describes Manas as “an AI drug discovery factory for creating monopolies” legally permissible, he notes, because pharmaceutical IP functions as a sanctioned monopoly by design."

epistasis8• 28 days ago

What a weird way to describe what is just another drug company, exactly the same way every single drug company functions.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 28 days ago

He's got it all figured out, like Myhrvold and Intellectual Ventures

6stringmerc• 28 days ago

Fantastic insight! I take his opinion as having the most merit possible in this context. Why?

Because LinkedIn is also a train wreck and game recognizes game.

winfredJa• 28 days ago

linkedin is not a $3T company though.

jordanb• 28 days ago

This shows how out of touch people like Reid Hoffman is.

He thinks it's a daming accusation that SpaceX is "not AI" but in reality "not AI" means rockets and satellite internet.

The parts of the business his class cares about is the garbage, not the substance

Agree that X.ai is a tire fire.

fluidcruft2• 28 days ago

The problem is that SpaceX financials supporting the IPO say SpaceX is a major AI company that has a minor side-hustle of making rockets that sell satellite internet.

spwa42• 28 days ago

That's the total picture of SpaceX, right. Does SpaceX as a whole make financial sense? No. Everyone knows the SpaceX "value story": AI means that a company that makes a minus 5 billion per year really makes plus 200 billion per year! IN SPACE! But, uh, about those Space parts? Surely those are cashflow positive ... right? RIGHT?

Well, no.

SpaceX it is the 50th or so rocket company. The previous ones did not fail because they couldn't get rockets working or couldn't improve on the state of the art in rocketry. The ones not supported by nation-states failed because they couldn't get the financials working. To be fair some of them failed because they couldn't get to earth orbit. But that's not the common case. More common: "New rocket type works! We demonstrated it succesfully! No launches ... so no money. We're publishing our work and shutting down. Bye". Irritatingly quite a few of these new rocket companies are theoretically more efficient than SpaceX will ever be. Also irritatingly most of these companies, through financial necessity, demonstrated a working rocket in one try, in contrast to SpaceX.

(my favorite? Aerospike nozzles. Aside from their great "Wiley E. Coyote" potential should launch fail they look absolutely incredible)

Did Space part of SpaceX get the financials working? No. Not even with Starlink (their debt repayments still drag it into the negative). What is their fix for too small a market? Make Spaceship, an even bigger rocket ... for a market that sees no use for the existing Falcon 9 launch capacity ...

Starlink: same. It's not even the 10th satellite internet company. The previous ones all failed, because the market was too small, and had to be bailed out by nation states, famously Iridium. Did Starlink solve the financials? No.

The most irritating bit of this is of course Elon Musk himself. Why did he succeed? Well he keeps mentioning himself and "starting from first principles". As illustrated above: he started from first principles, he failed (private, ie. profitable access to earth orbit? SpaceX doesn't do that), then he got incredible amounts of money somewhere to pour down a black hole (using artificial demand like Starlink) and so everything is still moving. Obviously Elon Musk's achievement is 100% finding this money and 0% practicing science from first principles".

That's also Elon Musk's great redeeming quality. What's his achievement? Convincing, first himself, then humanity, or at least enough humans to get ~300 billion in cash, that Space exploration is worth doing despite the fact that it's unprofitable. The actual technical Space exploration side he ... frankly didn't do particularly well, though well enough that it (eventually) worked. But the result is still fantastic: we're in space far more than before!

endyai• 28 days ago

isn't that his point?

dantillberg• 28 days ago

It sounds like you agree with Hoffman's statement. So how is he "out of touch"?

matthewdgreen• 28 days ago

The SpaceX S-1 says they’re going to be making $320bn by 2030 on AI services at a profit margin of 74%. That dwarfs all the launch business and even Starlink, which they very optimistically project as well. This is how they supported the IPO valuation.

CodingJeebus• 28 days ago

The SpaceX IPO prospectus states that the company is targeting a TAM of $28.5T, equal to roughly a quarter of the world's gross economic output.

Patrick Boyle said it best. Roughly 1 billion people on the planet make more than $12k annually (folks with "discretionary" income). Divide that TAM of $28.5T by 1B and the every single person needs to give SpaceX ~$28.5K every year forever in order for that figure to make sense. It's more than 3x what the planet spends on food currently.

narnarpapadaddy2• 28 days ago

If this happened it would make Elon emperor of the known universe. Can’t imagine the level of influence this would buy.

It also seems impossible. What are people seeing that I don’t?

grey-area• 28 days ago

Rockets and Starlink do not support even a fraction of the valuation given their revenue projections.

In a sane market neither will generative AI, but that’s what’s propping up this valuation at present.

So you appear to agree with him that the valuation is nonsensical.

rob74• 28 days ago

Sorry, that's a typo, it's not SpaceX, it's SPAC X - as in, Musk is using SpaceX as a SPAC to absorb other AI companies. Cursor is the first, but will certainly not be the last. So, if it's not an AI company yet, it will be soon. I mean, the humongous total addressable market from their IPO filing has to come from somewhere, and Grok will definitely not cut it...

youngtaff3• 28 days ago

A TAM that’s equivalent to 20% of worldwide GDP is just nonsense

deadbabe2• 28 days ago

Not an AI company? You don’t have to keep selling me on SPCX, I’m a buyer now.

philipwhiuk• 28 days ago

Unfortunately for you, it's priced like one.

cj• 28 days ago

SpaceX: "Not an AI company, but priced like one"

Tesla: "Not a tech company, but priced like one"

drob518• 28 days ago

Careful. I don’t have anti-Musk bias, but it can both be true that SpaceX will be quite successful in the long run and the stock is still overpriced in the short run.

deadbabe2• 28 days ago

When it falls I’ll just average down.

mbmbn3• 28 days ago

I mean, I can see some issues with SpaceX valuation, but I find it really funny that we are now taking advice from the LinkedIn founder on HN.

Ideology is truly blinding.

ryno364• 28 days ago

Reid Hoffman hates Musk. Think what you will of Musk (we all have our opinions), but Hoffman criticizing one of Musks companies is the equivalent of Steve Jobs criticizing Windows. Its a personal quibble and therefore not really news worthy.

expedition32• 28 days ago

That's like saying nobody should have listened to MLK criticising segregation because he hated the KKK.

fourseventy2• 28 days ago

ridiculous comparison

Demiurge• 28 days ago

It would only be like that if MLK was trying to become the lead white supremacist.

trollbridge4• 28 days ago

I think that’s a pretty inappropriate comparison and you should withdraw it. Please edit your post?

petilon5• 28 days ago

If you want to know why you shouldn't choose Windows it makes sense to get Steve Jobs' opinion and then evaluate the opinion.

mbmbn3• 28 days ago

It’s like Bill Gates criticizing Apple… if you really want to split hairs about the analogy used.

duxup• 28 days ago

I would want jobs opinion because Jobs would give a good analysis, more so because I would value his opinion.

Any other person selling an alternative… might just be BS.

rchaud2• 28 days ago

Instead of listening to the critiques of actual Windows users? Jobs was an evangelist who couldn't see past his Nintendo-esque ecosystem zealotry, didn't use Windows and thereby couldn't understand why Windows won the enterprise and computer gaming market despite its flaws.

blenklo4• 28 days ago

He still can be right.

But yeah its clear that xAI is a trainwreck and Space-X is weird cult hype.

not-kinsale-joe• 28 days ago

Steve Jobs did have valid criticisms of Windows.

indoordin0saur2• 28 days ago

Saying it's like Pepsi criticizing Coca Cola is probably a better analogy.

jklinger410• 28 days ago

This is like the guy at Techdirt writing another article about how dumb Elon is.

AJRF2• 28 days ago

How is Reid Hoffman relevant?

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

otterley2• 28 days ago

As the article said, Reid Hoffman is on Microsoft’s board and is an investor both in OpenAI and Anthropic.

AJRF2• 28 days ago

I read the article - and many articles touting what Reid said - but my question remains - why in the name of god is he relevant.

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.

endemic• 28 days ago

So he has money.

jerf2• 28 days ago

So, a guy with probably one of the largest incentives in the world to trash xAI is trashing xAI?

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.

raincole• 28 days ago

It means his opinions about xAI are worth less than a random HNer's, since he has a very strong incentive to talk bad about it.

nottorp• 28 days ago

That Microsoft who added LARGE BLUE copilot buttons on the dialogs you get in Visual Studio when it stops on a breakpoint or exception?

petilon5• 28 days ago

Other than co-founding one of the most successful tech companies, that is.

antiframe3• 28 days ago

If you are talking about LinkedIn, I don't know how universally they are considered a tech company. Is any company that does its core business on a website a tech company now, even if their innovations aren't tech? NY Times has some fancy tech, but you'd be hard pressed to consider them a tech company.

blenklo4• 28 days ago

How is he less relevant than Elon Musk?

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?

antiframe3• 28 days ago

If you are going to include a speaker's child-naming prowess as a factor in assigning value to an opinion, you might as well just flip a coin, go with vibes, go with the one that matches your biases, or all three.

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.

officeplant• 28 days ago

He co-founded linkedin

That alone should be justifiable cause for exile from society.

sixothree2• 28 days ago

There sure are a lot of people attacking the messenger here. This seems fairly par for anyone criticizing one of musks properties.

giancarlostoro• 28 days ago

I'm not interested in people's take on SpaceX this early after their IPO, they have an ambitious vision and Elon Musk gets a lot of blind hatred. You don't invest into SpaceX to see returns in a month, you're in it for the next five or more years or you're better off finding a different stock to invest in. To date SpaceX is the top leader in getting things into space for the lowest cost, everyone else pales in comparison.

dtj1123• 28 days ago

Other than launching satellites, being able to get things into space for the lowest cost is about as relevant as being able to get things to the bottom of the ocean for the lowest cost.

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.

epistasis8• 28 days ago

People don't invest in SpaceX because of space launch capability, that barely counts for their valuation at all.

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.

efdee• 28 days ago

In that case you'd be better off waiting 6 to 12 months before buying into SPCX.

spacington• 28 days ago

Space-x is it's biggest customer.

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?

xnx• 28 days ago

Is Elon credible? He's been wrong so so many times about "full" self driving: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...

Mountain_Skies2• 28 days ago

He's said many things that didn't come to be but since he controls over a trillion dollars in assets, anything he says will be impactful, perhaps even more so if it is something incorrect.

nailer5• 28 days ago

And? Self driving works. I've taken a bunch of cars in Miami and UAE where somebody was at the wheel for legal reasons only.

simianwords2• 28 days ago

You can’t do an unweighted analysis like so. Even if he did get a single thing right, you need to weigh it by the impact.

tripledry2• 28 days ago

Not commenting on Reid specifically but on the other hand I don't understand why we should listen to the Tech CEO's / Founders about their opinions on the tech they are selling.

petilon5• 28 days ago

Why wouldn't you listen to a company on why their product solves the problem you're having?

jcgrillo6• 28 days ago

They're all clowns. None of them are credible. TBH this extends much further down than the C-suite. Generally it seems like something happens to people's brains when they hit roughly Director+ where they just start spouting absolute nonsense.

michaelmrose• 28 days ago

Elon said we should spend most or all of our GDP building more silicon than we can actually make to launch it all into space where we had no meaningful solution to economically cooling it burning all of our money for a product that currently makes no money delivered in a fashion that can't possibly work. It's not clear that he understands AI or rockets.

Remember prepared statements can be written by smarter people. Ask him to speak extemporaneously and find out how stupid he really is.

fhdkweig• 28 days ago

Guy who sells trips to space says we need to put more stuff in space. AI is hot now, so he has to connect his business to AI. Remember when he put a car in orbit? This is more of the same.

Fricken2• 28 days ago

Reid Hoffman isn't relevant. Don't attack the person, attack the substance of their argument. How is xAI not a total shitshow? This is the question you need to be able to answer.

JumpCrisscross8• 28 days ago

How is Reid Hoffman relevant?

What does this actually mean? I’ve always taken this use of relevance as an influencer metric.

nailer5• 28 days ago

It means why do we care what the LinkedIn founder has to say about xAI.

The answer seems to be "we don't, he's on the board of a competiting AI company"

jauntywundrkind• 28 days ago

I don't have a strong feel for Reid's personal case, but it's worth noting that the media keeps Reid in focus because he is the only visible (and audible) blue Democratic big tech person.

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.

randusername• 28 days ago

This article encouraged me to look at the investor materials [0].

The 55th slide "key metrics" wording stood out to me:

AI: "Nameplate Compute Draw" Total number of GPUs installed in the data centers at the end of a period multiplied by the respective all-in power draw, reflecting installed capacity and not actual power consumption or utilization

Close to $15 billion in losses since 2023 and not much clarity on actual usage or impact. TIL the plan of record is AI satellites assembled on the moon.

[0] https://ir.spacex.com/investors/default.aspx

rvz2• 28 days ago

OpenAI investor Reid Hoffman says competitor xAI is a "complete train wreck".

Why listen to these people when they have a clear vested interest in talking nonsense about their competitors?

These comments from investors are predictable and it is obvious why they keep doing this.

sixothree2• 28 days ago

Did you not see literally every other top level comment in this thread?

rvz2• 28 days ago

Look at the time I posted my comment.

I commented 51 mins ago when there were around two comments here that were not talking about Reid's bias against xAI.

5 more comments appeared afterwards in roughly the same timeframe when I posted my reply and that was the first mention of Reid being an OpenAI investor which is enough to explain his obvious bias here.

Havoc• 28 days ago

The key part - Reid being invested in both OpenAI and anthropic should have been higher up in the article. Pretty crucial context to him trash talking XAI.

Not that I disagree with his assessment…

kylemaxwell• 28 days ago

It was at the very top just now when I looked. That said, the site has so many distracting pop-ups and other interruptions it's hard to see anything there.

nailer5• 26 days ago

Nope, it's just:

Reid Hoffman has watched the AI industry from virtually every vantage point—as a founder, lead investor, and decade-long Microsoft board member.

Nothing about him being an investor in 2 direct competitors.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 28 days ago

Maybe he invested in the competition because xAI is a train wreck?

outside1234• 28 days ago

I wake up every morning amazed that there were enough people foolish enough to buy a company with only $18B in revenue and no profit at basically at the valuation of Microsoft (a company with $300B in revenue and $100B in profit).

fourseventy2• 28 days ago

Short it then

neogodless• 28 days ago

There are more than those two options, both of which are "take unnecessary risk on a hugely uncertain investment."

fluidcruft2• 28 days ago

Cults remain irrational longer than the sane can remain solvent. Particularly when the cult captures regulators and governments.

the__alchemist2• 28 days ago

I'm with the parent post, and I did!

an0malous• 28 days ago

A ton of them are on this thread

N_Lens2• 28 days ago

They would be very upset with your comment if they could read!

globalnode• 28 days ago

What a terrible world to live in. Of course hes trying to convince Gen Z of the "opportunities" they have. Opportunities for him and his oligarch friends to make a load of $. Cant wait for this AI bubble to crash and dissolve a bunch of undeserved wealth.

Fricken2• 28 days ago

Last week Yann LeCun called xAI a "failure"

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/18/yann-lecun-elon-musk-xai-fai...

zulux• 28 days ago

>LeCun, who was previously Meta chief AI scientist,

Well, I guess he should know.

trollbridge4• 28 days ago

Seems very relevant that SpaceX’s primary AI offerings are:

- Cursor - Lots of data centre capacity being rented to Anthropic and Google and others

That seems very much like being an AI company.

verdverm2• 28 days ago

Renting GPUs doesn't make you an Ai company imo, colocation data center is more accurate. One might expect that line of business to commodify within five years.

trollbridge4• 28 days ago

Yeah, like how AWS has “commodified”

Cursor is obviously an AI company and the main problem Cursor faced was not really having their own model and being forced to buy expensive inference from other providers.

Cursor + their own data centres + the ability to train their own models is pretty big. Definitely an AI company.

unregistereddev• 28 days ago

This is nitpicky (and it supports your point, I'm not arguing): Colocated data centers became a commodity decades ago. Currently they are a scarce commodity that's in high demand, but I agree with you that this will eventually come full cycle.

youngtaff3• 28 days ago

They’re not long term contract though… some might only be 90days

nevf1• 28 days ago

Whilst nobody can dispute the inordinate success Hoffman has had in building and scaling LinkedIn and his work on Greylock, his associations with the Epstein files, previous spats with Musk, and his warped political views makes me question anything he says.

In this instance, I see it as nothing more than a self-serving and politically motivated diss against Musk, even if the substance of what he says is true.

BluSyn• 28 days ago

Compared to what? All the comments seem to agree, but I curious if people here have actually used Grok.

I rotate between major models frequently. Grok has been up there in accuracy and research for some time, trading places with Gemini IMO. Latest 4.3 release has been solid.

Composer is pretty good and now they own Cursor. Don’t count them out yet.

So.. it’s bad, compared to what? Claude from 2 months ago?

vorticalbox• 28 days ago

i jump about a lot, for coding gemini and grok are definitely not as strong as gpt 5.5/opus/sonnet/composer.

composer 2.5 is actually very good and use it for a good chunk of tasks.

lxgr• 28 days ago

Gemini has been atrocious, in my experience. Not sure if it's the harness or the model, but it hallucinates much, much more than GPT (via ChatGPT) or Claude, and weirdly assumes it can just answer complex, knowledge-heavy domain questions without doing a web search.

brazukadev• 28 days ago

All the comments seem to agree, but I curious if people here have actually used Grok.

you got your answer already. Nobody actually uses Grok.

uyzstvqs• 28 days ago

Elon Musk's companies launch rockets, build the most high-tech electric cars, host the world's most relevant social network, deploy high-speed internet to most of the world, build one of the world's leading LLMs, I could go on...

Reid Hoffman runs a social network for spam.

breve• 28 days ago

build the most high-tech electric cars

Teslas aren't the most high-tech these days. They have fallen behind on the hardware side, particularly in charging and batteries. Here's a charging speed comparison:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cy46Ag0djjk

excalibur• 28 days ago

The timing of Hoffman’s remarks is pointed. SpaceX went public on June 12th, with AI central to its IPO narrative. Within days, the company announced it was acquiring Cursor, the AI coding tool. Hoffman’s read: that’s not proof of AI capability, but evidence of its absence. “You could almost think of it as the IAC of AI,” he said, invoking the serial acquisitions roll-up strategy of Barry Diller’s internet-era conglomerate. “Use the market cap to buy AI companies and try to buy your way into relevance.”

Sounds like securities fraud to me.

kklisura2• 28 days ago

SpaceX renting out their compute to competitors is what crashes the "AI company" notion. They are either datacenter company or an AI company - but it cannot be both.

nr378• 28 days ago

Arguably Google is both (with GCP and Gemini).

gurjeet• 28 days ago

From GP's point of view, Google is not a data center company because they're not renting out data centers to other companies; they're using them for their own usage.

andsoitis7• 28 days ago

They are either datacenter company or an AI company - but it cannot be both.

why not?

kklisura2• 28 days ago

Either you are in need of as much as compute as possible since you're building frontier AI models or you're not and you're just renting out the compute. And let's face it - Grok, if not failure, is just a toy.

Ekaros2• 28 days ago

You can be both but you probably are not very good AI company if you have significant amount of extra computing to rent. Or you calculated your own demand significantly wrong somewhere. Which again does not make you great AI company...

indoordin0saur2• 28 days ago

The fact that dozens of companies seem to have been able to produce great models, and the mid-tier ones are only months behind the frontier models tells me that just having a great model is not much of a moat. It may actually be having the physical stuff that makes all of this possible is the bigger revenue generator.

empath75• 28 days ago

Data centers do not trade on 100x earnings, and if you believe that they should, then there are plenty that don't have rocket ship and social media companies attached to them.

fmajid• 28 days ago

SpaceX is an ISP with a sideline in rocket launches, and xAI is a neocloud with delusions of grandeur.

himata4113• 28 days ago

The "Tell Gen Z to stop booing AI" is crazy to me. Are we living on the same planet, every argument is dismissed even though it's backed with real data.

alpineman• 28 days ago

> “I’ve been thinking about writing an essay on the kind of mistakes that are made by college graduates booing or otherwise dissing AI,” he said. As if speaking to all of Gen Z, he added: “You guys have the opportunity to be generation AI—where you come into the workforce saying, ‘I know this a lot better than all of you"

Quite patronising. Maybe they really do know it a lot better than you, Reid, but not in the way you think. Maybe they see through the hype and hustle culture and are more interested in working towards fulfilling lives and jobs.

jcgrillo6• 28 days ago

Such an out of touch attempt to get the youths onboard the hype train.. ok boomer.

andsoitis7• 28 days ago

ok boomer.

Reid Hoffman is not a boomer. He was born in 1967. Also: ageism isn't sexy.

mahoho• 28 days ago

It's time to give up your silly cynicism, embrace being a professional slop shoveler and doing work with higher volume, more repetition and less creativity than ever.

FeteCommuniste• 28 days ago

The sloppings will continue until morale improves.

emil-lp2• 28 days ago

I've embraced it, and I'm coding faster than all my colleagues, some days I open more PRs than the rest of my team combined.

intended• 28 days ago

The slip mines need more PhD labour to label stuff - that’s your future and you better learn to love it.

rchaud2• 28 days ago

This is going to be the GenX equivalent to the boomer meme about not spending money on avocado toast and save for a house instead.

If you kids could stop wasting money on Spotify and Xbox Live, you could pay $200/mo for ChatGPT Pro to become AI-native.

lp4v4n• 28 days ago

He is just being solipsistic and talking to a small circle of wealthy and well-connected Gen Zs that he probably knows in real life or who are part of his acquaintances. Or do you really think that people with his level of wealth remotely care about real career paths for the average youth?

epistasis8• 28 days ago

I don't know anybody with Hoffman's level of wealth, but I have come across a fair number of people with close to a billion dollars of wealth that now split their time between enjoying time with their own family and then trying to pursue philanthropy and non-profits meant to improve everybody's life in the community.

I run into them because of their attempts to improve the community. And there are those who do it super quietly, give big, and do everything they can to avoid getting credit for it; there's another Silicon Valley Reed that does this in my community. Steve Jobs apparently did this too, big donations but anonymously.

Do not take the blabbering idiots on the All-In podcast as representative of all of Silicon Valley, the old Valley was far different than those people and there are still plenty of people that pursue wealth not for the purposes of their own self-aggrandizement and power.

win311fwg4• 28 days ago

And even if they buy into what he is saying, that particular group are college graduates. They have already passed the window of opportunity one normally has to explore new ideas. They are in the phase of life where they have to hunker down and get to work. If this "generation AI" ever comes to fruition, it will be those who are still young enough today to be able spend most of their time playing.

jimbokun4• 28 days ago

People should stop exploring new ideas the second they graduate college??

Sounds like a sad way to live.

jknoepfler3• 28 days ago

Yeah that struck me as shallow, tone-deaf and ignorant.

People have very good, very legitimate reasons for "booing" GenAI.

Most human interactions with GenAI are either with corpo sludge or overly cheerful, dangerously useless text generators.

The technology is steadily eroding businesses from the inside out in the same way offshoring did in the 90s.

There's a massive crash looming that is going to crater the economy for years... caused by criminally irresponsible circular investment and silicon valley grift.

Not really what I'd want to tether my identity to.

shimman• 28 days ago

People like Reid Hoffman do far more damage to the Democratic party than he does helping it. Also don't look well that a member of Epstein's tech leadership, and personal friend, is telling workers how to feel and think.

jadar2• 28 days ago

Okay, random dude says something -- everything completely behind paywall. Guess it wasn't important.

emaro• 28 days ago

I don't get a paywall -- maybe it's thanks to uBlock Origin?

jadar2• 28 days ago

Okay, nevermind, I was able to view it on mobile.

nova22033• 28 days ago

How many people use grok professionally? Compared to claude code/codex?

cmiles8• 28 days ago

Guy who has enormous personal financial interest vested in xAI being a train wreck says xAI is a train wreck. Fascinating thought leadership.

HarHarVeryFunny• 28 days ago

The only objective information we really have is SpaceX's pre-IPO S-1 filing, which breaks down their revenue into Space, Communications and AI segments, with 2025 revenue for each given as.

Communications (i.e. Starlink) 11.3B

Space (i.e. launch services) 4.0B

AI (i.e. Twitter, Grok) 3.2B

According to Google's AI summary, Twitter 2025 revenue was 2.9B, and Grok was 0.5B, so the 2025 "AI" revenue is basically all Twitter, although at least temporarily going forward there will also be significant datacenter/GPU rental income from Anthropic and Google, and now we also have Cursor with an ARR of 4B.

The only significant "AI" revenue here is from Cursor. Datacenter rental seems like it will bring in a lot of money in 2026, but that's hardly "AI".

JumpCrisscross8• 28 days ago

The asymmetry—Anthropic penalized while OpenAI was not—is what troubles him most

This isn’t the asymmetry that worries me. Anthropic was penalized, which makes OpenAI (and xAI and every other American company) theoretically subject to the same class of penalties.

DeepSeek is not.

moralestapia• 28 days ago

I wish there as chrome extension that surrounds pdf file names with something like the infamously misused (((...))).

So that you are reminded, as you read about them, that they were one of Epstein "associates". Nothing wrong with that, of course, I'm sure it was only business deals, etc...

shadowtree• 28 days ago

Political and personal attack, no substance.

Reid is a mega-donor for the Dems, Elon for the Repubs.

Billionaires fighting, plebs on HN getting riled up.

pixel_popping• 28 days ago

xAI complete train wreck maybe, however their models are really great, in conversational Grok 4.3 is my favorite recently, followed by Opus 4.8. It's not that great for coding purposes tho.

maipen2• 28 days ago

It's not that great for coding purposes tho.

I found it to be otherwise, but it was not a complete hands off experience. Which is ideal for me, I like to be specific and grok 4.3 and composer are great code monkeys.

Opus and GPT are the models you want right now, for "I have no idea how to build this, so figure it out".

maipen2• 28 days ago

I've recently used grok build and grok is really competent at coding. Composer is slightly better IMO, but it's really close.

It's not Opus or GPT 5, but that's fine, I don't need the AI to vibecode, I need it to follow my instructions and avoid producing slop.

I think the next models will change everyone's pessimistic minds.

dburkland• 28 days ago

Why is this news? Reid isn't relevant.

childofhedgehog• 28 days ago

https://archive.is/qhW3h

perarneng• 27 days ago

" And it should be an opportunity, not a threat.”

This pisses me off actually. How detached from reality can you be. AI makes the job market place very unpredictable and smart people predict it won't be so good. Then you expect young people to be super excited about AI.

I like AI and im an AI Engineer but I hate the fact that AI is used to destroy jobs. It would be fine if jobs disappeared if there were alternatives but it's not. It's straight to unemployment. The worst hasn't happened yet but its coming.

Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'

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