Reid Hoffman, a partner at Greylock and the co-founder of LinkedIn, speaks during the WSJ Tech Live Conference hosted by Wall Street Journal on Montage Laguna Beach in Laguna Beach, California on October 21, 2024.
Frederic J. Brown | AFP | Getty Images
LinkedIn co -founder and risk capitalist Reid Hoffman became a billionaire from his company for a social work work, and is a lucrative bet for companies, including Airbnb and Zynga, at the same time supporting nuclear fusion launch Helion Energy.
Now Hoffman is diverted to health care he describes as “wonderful and scary”, with his latest startup Manas AI.
Hoffman and Dr. Siddhartha Mukhejee, author of the Oncologist and Pulitzer Award Award, discovered The company on Monday. Manas will use artificial intelligence to try to detect medication, starting with new treatments of aggressive cancer such as prostate cancer, lymphoma and three -time negative breast cancer.
The development of new drugs is a traditional expensive and complex process. It may take more than 10 years and cost billions of dollars to develop one drug, the report from Deloitte. Manas said he would use his ownership chemical library and filters on AI drive to identify the candidates for medication faster, ideally reducing the decades of detection process for just a few years.
“Most people had friends, family members, etc. who died of cancer or had serious cancer problems,” Hoffman told CNBC in an interview this week. “If we can make a big difference in this, which is a kind of thing in which AI can make a big difference, it is a kind of reason why AI can be great for humanity.”
Manas raised $ 24.6 million in seed financing and led General catalyst And Hoffman with participation from Greylock, where he is a partner. Hoffman has been deep in AI in recent years. He was an early investor in Openi, when the project was still a non-profit organization and helped start AI, along with Deepmind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman. Last year, Suleyman joined Microsoftwhere Hoffman is a member of the Management Board, as an executive director of a new unit called Microsoft AI. He was joined by several employees on the infection.
Manas also made a partnership with MicrosoftAnd they will use his Azure Cloud Computing platform. Hoffman, who sold LinkedIn Microsoft for $ 27 billion, said Manas also uses several additional tools from Microsoft, including those who are not yet available to the public.
Hoffman cooperates with Mukhejee at the creation of Manas for about a year, although the proceedings have picked up money in the last few months. Hoffman said the team felt ready to share his ambitions public this week because they are fine, the basic resources are fine.
‘Completely delighted’ see the competition
The company is a long way ahead, and the drug detection market is very competitive. Other startups along with the main pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly,, Pfizer and MerkThey also explore how to use AI to accelerate research and development of medication.
Hoffman said he felt confident in Manas’s approach, although he would be “completely delighted” if he saw that more companies were blooming.
“We also bring what the startup usually brings, which is a willingness to go very hard, you quickly leave things that are not doing,” he said. “Live as this week is important, and the result this week is important.”
After launching Manas on Monday, five different potential strategic partners have already approached the company, Hoffman said.
Hoffman said that the company was in the “Build Frast” and “learning and implementation”. One of his early initiatives is called Project Cosmos, which is an effort to mapping the basic rules of medication obligation, the company website states. Hoffman refused to share all the additional details about the project.
Manas currently has only four employees – including Hoffman and Mukherjee – but Hoffman said he would grow it. He acted as the “Ai Guy” company, while Mukhejee served as “a guy,” he said. Ultimately, Manas refers to the dispute of two fields.
“It’s not just the best science and it’s not just the best of AI, because any of them are not enough,” Hoffman said. “The two you need to put together.”
Like Ai guy, Hoffman carefully carefully careful about the sudden appearance of Chinese deep in the United States
Deepseek began to generate Buzz in January, when the startup published his model of elaboration of an open Code R1 code, which rival Openai’s O1. The model was reportedly developed in a fraction of the costs of rival models by Openi, anthropically, Google and others.
Hoffman said that although Deepsek can encourage US companies to pick up the pace and share their plans before, new discoveries do not suggest that big models are bad investment.
“The competition game is included,” he said, “but I don’t think it’s” Oh my God, we’re losing! “Like American technology.”
