- In ‘AI Valley,’ journalist Gary Rivlin follows Silicon Valley’s biggest names and their contributions to AI.
- One is LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, a legendary investor once called the “most connected person in Silicon Valley.”
- His front-row seat to AI left Hoffman unimpressed; he viewed it as a toddler, he once told Elon Musk.
The following is a book excerpt.
Reid Hoffman loved his time on campus. He was among the first 10 people at Stanford to pursue a newly minted major called Symbolic Systems, which, just like the field of artificial intelligence, melded computer science with linguistics, psychology, and other disciplines.
On campus, computer science majors dismissed Symbolic Systems as “C.S. lite” but the intellectually curious Hoffman valued the opportunity to take a wide array of classes across campus. Life was finally as he had fantasized it when he was younger, surrounded by like-minded souls who shared his thirst for learning and desire for late-night debates on vital issues.
One of those late-night debate partners was Peter Thiel, who would play a critical role in the development of artificial intelligence. The two made for an unlikely pairing. Where Thiel had been raised in a deeply religious conservative family, Hoffman was a product of the counter-culture sixties.
Family lore put Hoffman on his father’s shoulders at demonstrations opposing the Vietnam War that sometimes turned tumultuous. “Apparently, I was running from tear gas even before I could walk,” Hoffman said. The two met during their sophomore year in a philosophy class called “Mind, Matter, and Meaning.”
“I’m pretty sure he saw me as a bleeding-heart pinko commie,” Hoffman said. “And I’m absolutely certain I saw him as a libertarian wacko who seemed to have sprung out of Ayn Rand’s book, ‘The Fountainhead,’ fully formed.”
The two argued for well over an hour after their first class together and pretty much continued that debate for several decades, until Thiel gave more than $1 million to Donald Trump’s first campaign and they decided, for the sake of their friendship, to avoid politics.
As upperclassmen, the two ran for Stanford’s student government on a joint ticket. Hoffman was the left-winger, Thiel the right-winger. Both won.
The second AI winter hit just as Hoffman arrived on campus
But the kid who had worked his way through shelves of science fiction at the local library was excited for a real-life glimpse at what machines could do. “I was not alien to the notion of robots and artificial intelligence,” Hoffman said.
He secured a summer internship at the legendary Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), which gave the world the mouse and icon-driven computing, among other cornerstone contributions. There he became so engrossed in the AI-related research project he was assigned that he took a semester off to continue his work.
The next summer, he worked on expert systems at IBM
As an upperclassman, Hoffman worked with David Rumelhart, a giant of the AI world who had pioneered “parallel distributed processing models,” an approach that accelerated the speed by which a neural net could process information. Rumelhart served as Hoffman’s advisor through much of his time at Stanford.
Yet his front-row seat on AI left Hoffman unimpressed. As he would tell Musk years later over dinner, he viewed the technology as if it were just a toddler.
An AI winter meant less money for research but, even if cash had been flowing, computers were still not powerful enough. “The networks were so small they wouldn’t do anything other than toy problems,” Hoffman said. A major breakthrough while he was still at Stanford was a computer that could reliably read numbers printed on a check.
“I concluded AI was not going to happen anytime soon,” Hoffman said. “So I just went off to do other things.” An exceptional student, he applied for and won a coveted Marshall Scholarship, which provides free tuition and living expenses for American citizens pursuing a graduate degree at a university in the United Kingdom.
In 1990 he moved to England to pursue a doctorate in philosophy at Oxford University
There, at the oldest university in the English-speaking world (Oxford was founded in 1096), he imagined himself “grappling with the big questions of values and ethics and who we should be as a society,” he said.
Instead, he learned that his teachers were “hostile to the idea of academics being public intellectuals. The professors there seemed to only want to talk about esoteric theories without any interest in actual people. I very quickly realized that wasn’t me.”
Hoffman stuck it out long enough to earn a master’s in philosophy from Oxford’s Wolfson College. With no savings and no job prospects, he returned to his homestead to figure out what he would do next.
Hoffman moved in with his father back in Berkeley
His father, who had been a crusading lawyer earlier in his life, had settled into a career as a real estate attorney. During Hoffman’s second week home, his father asked him: You’re going to get a job, right?
“I’m researching my options,” Hoffman told him. His father’s retort: Why don’t you research why you need to get a job?
Hoffman had taken several computer science courses at Stanford but did not have the background or training he needed to secure a programming job in Silicon Valley. But plugging into the substantial network of friends he had built during his four years in Palo Alto, he learned about a team inside Apple developing a new online service called eWorld. They needed a contractor who could produce design mockups using Adobe’s Photoshop.
Hoffman had never used Photoshop
But his contact there handed him a manual and told him to be ready to start the following week. “Locking myself in a room for a weekend, I became a Photoshop ninja,” Hoffman said. Soon he was working as a full-time junior product manager, overseeing the design and launch of eWorld’s international offerings.
Hoffman had imagined himself as a public intellectual who penned essays and books on the day’s big issues. Instead he was helping Apple find a way to cash in on the internet.
From the book: “AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence” by Gary Rivlin. Copyright © 2025 by Gary Rivlin. Reprinted courtesy of Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Available wherever books are sold.
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