LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman says 15 people using AI can compete with 150 who aren't - and startups have the advantage

"Just ask LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, who made the point in a recent LinkedIn post and in an episode of the "Possible" podcast that aired on Wednesday. "15 people with AI can compete with 150 without it," Hoffman wrote on LinkedIn. "AI fundamentally changes what small teams can accomplish." "Small teams have clearer shared context, something large organizations can't replicate. AI amplifies this because you can build systems that capture and surface patterns across that shared context," he added."

"Speaking with AI engineer Parth Patil on the podcast, Hoffman pointed to an example in which Patil used a combination of Codex and Claude Code to create a French translator for the podcast. The two then experimented with the AI agent to localize the French translation. Codex even gave the option to enable translation pipelines for 68 other languages, Patil said."

AI empowers very small teams to produce work that rivals much larger groups by amplifying shared context and surfacing patterns across team-specific data. Startups adopting AI tend to design bespoke solutions tailored to their exact situations and rapidly prototype crude systems rather than searching for off-the-shelf products. Practical experiments include building translation pipelines and localized content using models like Codex and Claude Code, enabling operations such as French translation and expanding to dozens of languages. Tasks that were once prohibitively expensive or slow become affordable and easy to prototype, allowing tiny teams to iterate quickly and compete at much larger scale.

Read at Business Insider