All posts tagged: Hoffman

Reid Hoffman Thinks Doctors Should Ask AI for a Second Opinion

Reid Hoffman Thinks Doctors Should Ask AI for a Second Opinion

Following a three-decade career at the helm of some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies—cofounding LinkedIn and sitting on the boards of PayPal and OpenAI—Reid Hoffman recently turned his attention to health care. Hoffman’s startup, Manas AI, is building an AI engine that aims to fast-track the traditionally slow process of drug discovery for various cancers. Inspired by a dinner with renowned cancer physician Siddhartha Mukherjee, the company’s cofounder and CEO, its mission statement is to “shift drug discovery from a decade-long process to one that takes a few years.” But Hoffman’s enthusiasm for generative AI, in particular, stretches far beyond novel drug targets and small molecules. He believes that frontier models—the most advanced, large-scale AI models currently available from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic—should be a cornerstone of health care itself. “If as a doctor, you’re not using one or more frontier models as a second opinion, my belief is you’re bordering on committing malpractice,” Hoffman said, speaking at WIRED Health in London on April 16. “These AI systems, even though many of them …

The Arimasen Dialogues by Michael Hoffman

The Arimasen Dialogues by Michael Hoffman

Some books you read. A few read you back. The Arimasen Dialogues by Michael Hoffman belongs firmly to that second, stranger category. Open it expecting orderly chapters and settled prose, and the book will politely close itself. Open it ready to eavesdrop on voices arguing, joking, confessing, prophesying, and contradicting themselves inside the same breath, and you have walked into one of the most original novels I have picked up in a long while. The Setting: A Place That Claims Not to Exist The story unfolds on Arimasen, a place that is “quite like Earth in other respects” save for one small detail: it lies beyond Space, Time, and Matter. The Japanese word arimasen means, roughly, “there is not” or “does not exist,” and Hoffman wastes no ink pretending otherwise. Whether Arimasen is a planet, a metaphor, a hallucination, or a long shared dream between reader and text is a question the book keeps asking and never quite answers. A Singularity, we are told, occurred on July 20, 1969, the same day Earthlings watched a …

Robby Hoffman Jokes Spirit Award Grant Recipients Can ‘Spend Money How You Want’

Robby Hoffman Jokes Spirit Award Grant Recipients Can ‘Spend Money How You Want’

Robby Hoffman was the most frequent presenter at the 2026 Independent Spirit Awards, and in between delivering some of the most shining commentary on Sunday, she had to jokingly walk back a claim she made when introducing a grant recipient. The Hacks star hit the Hollywood Palladium stage to state the winners of the Spirit Awards‘ three grants: the Someone to Watch Award, the Truer Than Fiction Award and the Producers Award. While she was introducing the first honor, Hoffman joked that “you can spend the money how you want. I mean, what the hell do I care, right?” (Tatti Ribeiro, director of Valentina, earned the Someone to Watch Award last month.) When Hoffman returned to launch the Truer Than Fiction Award segment, she joked that “the reason I’m back is they told me you’re actually not allowed to use the money however you see fit on the last grant.” “I didn’t read the script that they apparently emailed that came out a couple of weeks ago,” Hoffman said. “I’m behind on my emails, that’s the …

Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman Get Dangerously Kinky

Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman Get Dangerously Kinky

When Olivia Wilde first read the script for I Want Your Sex, co-written by Karley Sciortino, she had exactly the reaction that any fan of the provocative filmmaker Gregg Araki would hope for: “[I] laughed so hard, just cackling away on my couch, sending them both voice notes about how much I fucking loved it,” the 41-year-old star says, “and said, ‘Yes of course I need to play this insane character, as long as we find the best actor of all time to play Elliot.’”  This would be Araki’s first film in over a decade. Wilde would play Erika Tracy, a boundary-pushing artist in contemporary Los Angeles. She would need to act opposite a fearless younger actor portraying Elliot, Erika’s new intern — oh, and sadomasochistic sexual muse.  Wilde suggested the 22-year-old Cooper Hoffman, a rising star (and son of the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman) who’s not exactly known for risqué fare. “I’m all, ‘Cooper Hoffman? You mean the kid from Licorice Pizza? That’s so creepy and weird. He’s like a baby!’” Araki says …

Reid Hoffman Wants Silicon Valley to ‘Stand Up’ Against the Trump Administration

Reid Hoffman Wants Silicon Valley to ‘Stand Up’ Against the Trump Administration

Reid Hoffman doesn’t do much in half measures. He cofounded LinkedIn, of course, and helped bankroll companies including Meta and Airbnb in their startup days. He has also fashioned himself, via books, podcasts, and other public appearances, as something of a public intellectual—a pro-capitalist philosopher who still insists that tech can be a force for good. Most recently, Hoffman has emerged as one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent defenders of artificial intelligence. His newest book, 2025’s Superagency, makes the case that AI won’t diminish human capacity but will instead amplify it. In our conversation for this week’s episode of The Big Interview, Hoffman readily riffed on AI’s utility for pretty much everything, whether you’re looking for a research assistant or a second opinion on your blood work. Hoffman even relied on AI to make one of the most unconventional—and perhaps uncomfortable, depending on your view of AI-generated creativity—Christmas gifts I’ve heard of lately. (And no, he didn’t get me one.) Whatever you think of Hoffman’s utopian views on AI, credit where due: He’s also a …