LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman's go-to gift this Christmas was an AI-generated music album
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- Reid Hoffman, an AI fan, said he gave his friends and family generated music for Christmas presents.
- The billionaire LinkedIn cofounder is worth around $2.5 billion, according to Forbes.
- It comes as Hoffman mounts his defense of AI — and says skeptics are falling into a common trap.
Reid Hoffman loves AI. So much so that, for Christmas, instead of fuzzy socks or wool sweaters, he gave his friends and family an AI music album.
The LinkedIn cofounder and Greylock partner, who Forbes estimates has a $2.5 billion net worth, recently told Wired he generated silly Christmas songs using AI and pressed them onto records.
"There's a song on ugly sweaters and all of this kinda stuff," he said. "As opposed to the 'Holly, Jolly Christmas,' you know, something that actually has some humor. Almost like what 'Weird Al' Yankovic would do if he was doing a Christmas album."
To create the Christmas music, Hoffman said he used two different AI agents: one to write the lyrics and another to compose the music.
It's not clear which AI tool Hoffman used to generated the songs. His current firm, Greylock, doesn't list any of the major music-generating apps — like Suno, Udio, or AIVA — in its investment portfolio.
But, whichever tool he used, Hoffman said he was impressed by the result.
He said he told everyone who received the gift that it was AI, but when he played it for his wife, she couldn't tell it was computer-generated.
The Christmas surprise comes as Hoffman has been talking about AI while promoting a new book published with journalist Greg Beato titled "Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future."
In it, the two argue that AI doesn't need to be a dystopian technology destined to displace workers or lead to human extinction, as some more pessimistic about the technology have warned.
Hoffman argues that AI skeptics are falling into the same trap that has gripped tech cynics in the past, including existential complaints during the rollouts of the printing press, electricity, and the internet.
"My push for people is if you are not using AI in a way today that isn't seriously helpful to you, you are not actually trying hard enough," he told Wired. "Now, of course it'll transform jobs, and there'll be a bunch of pain in that transformation. But the way that you as an individual can avoid that is to be engaged."