Reid Hoffman Thinks Doctors Should Ask AI for a Second Opinion
After three decades career leading some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies – co-founder of LinkedIn and member of the boards of PayPal and OpenAI – Reid Hoffman recently turned his attention to health care.
Hoffman’s startup, Manas AI, is building an AI engine that aims to speed up the traditionally slow process of drug discovery for various cancers. Inspired by a dinner with renowned cancer scientist Siddhartha Mukherjee, the company’s co-founder and CEO, its mission statement is to “take drug discovery from a decades-long process to a few-years process.”
But Hoffman’s enthusiasm for generative AI, in particular, extends well beyond new drug targets and small molecules. He believes that pioneering models – the most advanced large-scale AI models currently available from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic – should be the cornerstone of healthcare itself.
“If as a physician you are not using one or more boundary models as a second opinion, I think you are on the verge of malpractice,” Hoffman said, speaking at WIRED Health in London on April 16. “These AI systems, although many of them are not specifically trained for medicine, have ingested over a trillion words of information. As a second opinion, they bring superpowers that no human being possesses.”
Such comments will undoubtedly shake many doctors. Earlier this year, a major study concluded that large language patterns pose risks to members of the general public seeking medical advice due to their propensity to provide inaccurate and editable information.
Hoffman’s argument is that rather than entrusting critical thinking skills to AI models, people should use them as an additional source of information, which he says could prevent diagnostic errors. He claims to personally use Border Models as a second opinion for matters related to his own health and insists that his personal concierge doctors do so as well.
“You might very well say, ‘No, I think you’re wrong, I think that’s it,'” he told WIRED’s health audience. “But if you don’t use that as a second opinion, you’re making a mistake, both as a doctor and as a patient.”
As the U.K.’s National Health Service buckles under the pressure of long waiting lists and workforce issues, including a chronic shortage of family doctors, Hoffman believes there is an increasingly pressing need for a large-scale language model that could serve as a free medical assistant on every smartphone. He suggests it could also serve as a form of early triage for appointments with human doctors.
“We simply don’t have enough doctors, most people don’t have access to them, and when we ask, ‘How should the NHS be redesigned?’ everyone should interact with this medical assistant,” he said.
Although he has a conflict of interest as an entrepreneur working in drug discovery, Hoffman also wants to see AI play a broader role in helping the FDA and other regulators evaluate emerging drugs, as well as speeding up the availability of particularly promising drugs to patients.
“As someone from Silicon Valley, I would like to get to the point where the FDA is also doing testing with biological models, saying, ‘Oh, we should speed this one up, because the likelihood of negative consequences is lower,’” he said. “Do I think it’s coming soon? Unfortunately, no.”
As for Manas AI, human judgment still plays a key role in the company’s decisions about what goals to pursue. Mukherjee carefully reviews his AI engine’s proposals, Hoffman says, and separates the genuinely interesting candidates from the “crazy and stupid.”
Although the company’s initial focus is on cancer, Hoffman believes the potential for AI discovery engines is much broader, enabling the identification of drug candidates for chronic but also extremely rare diseases that are traditionally not as economical for pharmaceutical companies to research.
“I think in 10 years, every major disease will have target molecules that could at least make a serious difference,” Hoffman said.
