Food for thought
In what ways have you already seen superagency at work? How has AI empowered you or a colleague or friend? How has collaboration around AI expanded its positive effects?
Welcome to AI in Action. In this edition, the first in a series of four learning modules, we explore key concepts from our Superagency in the workplace report, with video clips, interactive activities, podcast excerpts, and ideas for further reflection. Regardless of your background with AI, there is much to learn and inspire in the following content—we encourage you to immerse yourself in these activities and proceed at your own pace.
Tune in below for a warm welcome from AI thought leaders—and our hosts—Reid Hoffman and Lareina Yee. We hope their excitement and rich conversation prompt reflection on your own role in AI’s future.
Superagency in the business context
Lareina introduces a key concept discussed in this module: superagency.
What is superagency, really?
Reid explains superagency through an extended metaphor: the cognitive industrial revolution.
How is AI different from past innovations?
Reid discusses how AI builds on past innovations, such as the internet, to create something even more powerful.
Test your knowledge
What new technology will emerge over the next 15 years?
Reid elaborates on exciting AI capabilities he predicts will emerge in coming years.
Further reading
What is artificial general intelligence (AGI)?
-
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a theoretical AI system with capabilities that rival those of a human. Many researchers believe we are still decades, if not centuries, away from achieving AGI.
What’s the future of generative AI? An early view in 15 charts
-
Generative AI has hit the ground running—so fast that it can feel hard to keep up. Here’s a quick take pulled from our top articles and reports on the subject.
Another perspective on AGI
Another perspective on AGI
In an excerpt from his article “Machines of loving grace: How AI could transform the world for the better,” Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, describes his projected characteristic of AGI (which he prefers to call powerful AI):
- It has all the “interfaces” available to a human working virtually, including text, audio, video, mouse and keyboard control, and internet access.
- It does not just passively answer questions; instead, it completes complex multistep tasks autonomously.
- It does not have a physical embodiment, but it can control existing physical tools.
- The resources used to train the model can be repurposed to run millions of instances of it and the model can absorb information and generate actions roughly ten to 100 times faster than humans.
- Each of these million copies can act independently on unrelated tasks or, if needed, can all work together in the same way humans would collaborate.
What is agentic AI?
Reid and Lareina dive deeper into the concept of agentic AI and how technology “taking action” more broadly affects humans.
Gen AI: A cognitive industrial revolution
Reid Hoffman: There’s a lot of things that go into the training of these models beyond simply providing data. These models are intensive learning machines. And in this phase, called post-training with human-feedback learning, they go through a set of drills and give two answers, and the human judge says, “This one is better.”
So in the case of Inflection’s Pi, one of the things that the Inflection team came up with was to train emotional intelligence [EQ] as intensely as we train IQ. So when we’re doing human-feedback learning, we teach Pi to give an answer with EQ.
One simple example might be if you asked both Pi and ChatGPT how much you console a friend after the loss of a treasured family pet. They would both give the same sort of answers, but ChatGPT might say, “And here are the five things you could do.”
Pi, one the other hand, might say, “You know your friend. What would count as being there for your friend? Might it be just expressing the sympathy that you feel with them in their moment of anguish? Or something else?” And then it would help you walk through that, even though both models know the five possible actions.
Lareina Yee: This is pretty extraordinary, because you’re basically saying we have the IQ, but we can also train EQ. That could include empathy, active listening, how to stay positive, and how to listen to feedback. Tell us a little bit about how you see those two attributes in AI solutions, and the connection to our experiences.
Reid Hoffman: One thing that’s certain in the next five to ten years is that we are going to have agents everywhere, doing all kinds of things for us through all kinds of interactions. There will be agents for groups, agents for companies, and many other types. And the most natural thing when you’re doing engineering is to get IQ correct. But one of the things that’s really essential for people is how we bring EQ into it.
At the Edge podcast excerpt
Reid Hoffman
Partner, Greylock Partners
Cofounder, LinkedIn, Inflection AI
Reid Hoffman
Pace of progress
Pace of progress
AI capabilities are rapidly advancing. As a result, many business leaders think they should increase the speed of AI adoption within their businesses.
- In what ways have you noticed the changing speed of AI advancement?
- Is your organization moving at pace with AI advancement? Are you ahead of the pack or behind the curve?
Brief recap of what we learned
AI in Action: An interactive learning journey
Report
Superagency in the workplace: Empowering people to unlock AI’s full potential
Almost all companies invest in AI, but just 1 percent believe they are at maturity. Our research finds the biggest barrier to scaling is not employees—who are ready—but leaders, who are not steering fast enough.