Reid Hoffman points AI’s next gold rush to medicine

AI in – LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman says the biggest next revenue opportunity from AI is in medicine, arguing the market is larger than the current chatbot wave. He also describes his New York biopharmaceutical company Manas AI’s goal of using AI to speed early dr

Reid Hoffman is watching the AI boom, but his attention is already drifting toward a different prize.

On Wednesday. the LinkedIn cofounder told listeners on “The Possible Podcast” that people are overlooking what he sees as one of the biggest revenue opportunities in AI: companies applying machine intelligence in medicine. “Now it’s the time for medicine,” Hoffman said. He pointed to a market that. in his view. dwarfs the current excitement around AI chatbots. saying people are “googly-eyed about the … Anthropic revenue thing.”.

His pitch is direct: the chatbot leaders have set the pace. but medicine offers greater upside simply because the addressable market is bigger. Hoffman said the leading players in AI chatbots include OpenAI and Anthropic. and argued that investors looking to make money should turn toward AI in medicine. which has “massively larger TAMs [total addressable markets].”.

The reason Hoffman keeps coming back to medicine is the timeline. He stressed that the time between identifying a drug and rolling it out on the market is lengthy and can take “over 10 years,” and only if a drug makes it through clinical trials.

That long road is exactly where his company, Manas AI, is trying to intervene. Hoffman. a cofounder of Manas AI—a New York-based biopharmaceutical company—said the firm uses AI models to discover medicines and bring them to the market. The company’s aim. he said. is to make that process more efficient by using AI to bolster early-stage research before devoting resources to research and development.

“What we’re doing at Manas is creating a drug discovery factory for monopolies. ” Hoffman said. describing drugs as “essentially legal … 20-year-long monopolies.” He then grounded that idea in how intellectual property works in the US: the term of a new patent is “20 years from the date on which its application was filed in the US.” He added that the FDA can grant varying lengths of market exclusivity depending on the type of drug. For a drug used for a rare disease or condition, the exclusivity can be “7 years long.”.

But Hoffman also pushed back against a simplistic belief that biopharmaceutical markets work like a winner-take-all game. He disputed the idea that there is room only for one dominant player. “Think about the number of different providers of GLP1 drugs,” he said. “There are a number of different providers.” He added that “all of them are in the tens of billions of revenue.”.

From there, he drew a more nuanced conclusion. “So, it’s very possible to have a monopoly on your drug and have other drugs even in the same space in it to be really, really lucrative,” Hoffman said.

His broader message ties back to his central claim: the opportunity is less about what AI can already do loudly on the consumer front. and more about what it can unlock inside drug pipelines. Hoffman said the real opportunity lies with companies using AI to discover and develop the next generation of medicines.

He closed with the kind of question he believes investors should be asking as the industry chases scale. “The question is what other things are there to be discovered?” he said.

Hoffman’s comments also landed in the wider context of the surge of new drug-focused AI startups since the COVID-19 pandemic—companies that have emerged in the biopharmaceutical space offering solutions intended to reduce the cost and time required to get medicines to the people who need them.

Reid Hoffman AI in medicine Manas AI LinkedIn biopharmaceuticals drug discovery clinical trials patents FDA market exclusivity GLP-1 OpenAI Anthropic