Reed Hoffman believes doctors should ask AI for a second opinion

Three decades later Career at the helm of some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies – Co-Founder LinkedIn And sitting on the boards of PayPal and OpenAI—Reed Hoffman He recently turned his attention to health care.

Hoffman’s startup, Manas AI, is building an artificial intelligence engine that aims to speed up a traditionally slow process Drug discovery For various types of cancer. Inspired by a dinner with renowned cancer doctor Siddhartha Mukherjee, the company’s co-founder and CEO, Mission statement The goal is to “transform drug discovery from a decade-long process to a few years.”

But Hoffman’s enthusiasm for generative AI, in particular, extends beyond new drug targets and small molecules. He believes that pioneering models — the most advanced and broadest AI models currently available from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic — should be a cornerstone of healthcare itself.

“If you, as a doctor, are not using one or more of the leading models as a second opinion, my belief is that you are on the verge of committing malpractice,” Hoffman said, speaking at the WIRED Health conference in London on April 16. “These AI systems, although many of them are not specifically trained for medicine, have ingested upwards of a trillion words of information. As a second opinion, they bring superpowers that no human possesses.”

Such comments will undoubtedly worry many doctors. Earlier this year, Major study It is concluded that large linguistic models pose risks to members of the general public seeking medical advice due to their tendency to provide inaccurate and variable information.

Hoffman’s argument is that rather than outsourcing critical thinking abilities to AI models, people should use them as an additional source of information, one that he believes can prevent misdiagnosis. He claims that he personally uses borderline models as a second opinion on issues related to his health and insists that his personal concierge doctors do as well.

“You can say, ‘No, I think you’re wrong, I think that’s the case,'” he told WIRED’s health audience. “But if you’re not using that as a second opinion, you’re making a mistake, both as a doctor and as a patient.”

With the UK’s National Health Service subject to the pressures of extensive waiting lists and workforce challenges, including Chronic shortage of family doctorsHoffman believes there is an increasingly urgent need for a large language model that could serve as a free medical assistant on every smartphone. He notes that it could also serve as a form of early triage for appointments with human doctors.

“We don’t have enough doctors, most people don’t have access to these services, and when you think about ‘how should the NHS be redesigned?’ everyone should be interacting with this paramedic,” he said.

Although he has a conflict of interest as a drug discovery entrepreneur, Hoffman is also keen to see AI play a broader role in helping the FDA and other regulatory agencies evaluate emerging drugs, as well as speeding up the availability of particularly promising drugs to patients.

“As someone in Silicon Valley, I would love to get to a point where the FDA was also doing tests using biological models, saying, ‘Oh, we should speed up this testing, because there’s less potential for negative consequences,’” he said. “Do I think this will happen anytime soon? Unfortunately, no.”

As for Manas AI, human judgment still plays a major role in the company’s decisions regarding what goals to achieve. Hoffman says Mukherjee closely reviews their AI engine proposals, sorting out the really interesting candidates from the “crazy idiots.”

While the company’s initial focus is on cancer, Hoffman believes the potential of AI discovery engines is much broader, enabling the identification of drug candidates for chronic but also very rare diseases that have traditionally not been economical to pursue for pharmaceutical companies.

“I think within 10 years, every major disease will have target molecules that can at least make a significant difference,” Hoffman said.