Reid Hoffman Thinks Doctors Should Ask AI for a Second Opinion
The LinkedIn cofounder now has an AI drug discovery startup—and thinks not asking chatbots for medical advice is “bordering on committing malpractice.”
Following a three-decade career at the helm of some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies—cofounding LinkedIn and sitting on 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 fast-track the traditionally slow process of drug discovery for various cancers. Inspired by a dinner with renowned cancer physician Siddhartha Mukherjee, the company’s cofounder and CEO, its mission statement is to “shift drug discovery from a decade-long process to one that takes a few years.”
But Hoffman’s enthusiasm for generative AI, in particular, stretches far beyond novel drug targets and small molecules. He believes that frontier models—the most advanced, large-scale AI models currently available from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic—should be a cornerstone of health care itself.
“If as a doctor, you're not using one or more frontier models as a second opinion, my belief is you're bordering on committing malpractice,” Hoffman said, speaking at WIRED Health in London on April 16. “These AI systems, even though many of them are not specifically trained for medicine, have ingested trillion-plus words of information. As a second opinion, it is bringing superpowers that no human being has.”
Such comments will undoubtedly rattle many doctors. Earlier this year, a major study concluded that large language models present risks to members of the general public seeking medical advice due to their propensity for providing inaccurate and changeable information.
Hoffman’s argument is that rather than outsourcing critical thinking capabilities to AI models, people should use them as an additional source of information, one that he believes could prevent misdiagnosis. He claims to personally use frontier models as a second opinion for issues relating to his own health and insists that his personal concierge doctors do so as well.
