So, a guy with probably one of the largest incentives in the world to trash xAI is trashing xAI?

The information content of this is rather minimal. Even if everything he says is literally true it's hard to tell through the massive, massive vested interest he has.

And it doesn't help that...

'Hoffman, who is an investor in both Anthropic and OpenAI, pushed back firmly on the narrative that the two companies are in a zero-sum race. “We tend to want to tell these stories as cage matches,” he said, as in two companies enter and only one leaves, but “in fact,” he claimed, “there’s a lot of room for both of them to win incredibly.'

that's clearly a very self-interested gloss on the flip side of the situation. Yes, that's in the possibility space. No, I would not consider "both companies do fantastically for many many years" as a terribly large part of the possibility space. Look to all of the many past instances of industries starting up. It is a very common case that if you take the two early leaders you aren't looking at who is going to be the two biggest companies in 10 or 20 years. It is in fact a common case that neither of those companies are the leaders in 10 or 20 years. The sheer staggering size of the AI training moat at the current time may lock in the possibility that no other business could possibly overtake them... but what if somebody solves that massive training gap? It probably isn't mathematically fundamental; I can't help but observe that humans do not get to their level of capability by pouring the entire Internet through their head several times.

He probably does know a lot of things most of us don't know, but I doubt he's sharing very many of them in this article. This is just trash talk.

I read the article - and many articles touting what Reid said - but my question remains - why in the name of god is he relevant.

He is connected and gives money to people - why should that mean anyone should listen to him about any of this. He's not actually a do-er is he?

Is there something I am missing? The amount of coverage he gets seems massively disproportionate to his skill, talent and insight.

It means his opinions about xAI are worth less than a random HNer's, since he has a very strong incentive to talk bad about it.

So he has money.

That Microsoft who added LARGE BLUE copilot buttons on the dialogs you get in Visual Studio when it stops on a breakpoint or exception?