Reid Hoffman says AI has been ‘marketed horribly’ and sees a narrow path for tech optimists in 2028

Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and one of the Democratic Party’s most prominent financial backers, stood before a Washington audience on September 16 and delivered a blunt diagnosis of Silicon Valley’s biggest messaging failure. “AI has been marketed horribly to the American people,” Hoffman said during POLITICO’s Decoded Summit. The statement lands differently coming from someone who has spent years championing artificial intelligence as a transformative force, including in his book Superagency, where he frames the technology as an “intelligence multiplier” that enhances human capabilities rather than replacing them. The marketing problem nobody wants to own Hoffman’s core critique is that the public conversation around AI has calcified into two unhelpful camps. One side wants to accelerate development at all costs. The other wants to slam the brakes entirely. Neither faction, in his view, is spending enough time on the question that actually matters to most people: what does this technology do for me, specifically, on a Tuesday afternoon? Public anxiety about AI continues to grow, driven by concerns over job displacement, ballooning energy consumption from data centers,...