Reid and Aria dig into where AI is creating real, durable value—and where they see it heading to next. Reid shares an inside look at his AI-driven drug discovery work at Manas AI, making the case that medicine could be one of the biggest opportunities in the entire AI landscape. They also explore why AI will likely shift toward a mix of specialized agents and “front doors” rather than a single dominant assistant, how enterprise vs. consumer AI revenue will evolve, and what companies like Anthropic signal about where the real business of AI is taking shape. They also touch on the role of governments in delivering AI-powered public goods, before closing with a candid conversation on political corruption, institutional trust, and why civic courage still matters.

AI’s hidden 20-year monopoly

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# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** Possible

## Participants

- **Reid Hoffman** (Greylock)
- **Aria Finger** (Possible)
- **Siddhartha Mukherjee** (Manus AI)

## Transcript

[SPEAKER_03] Reid, it is delightful to be here with you in person.

[SPEAKER_01] Reid Hoffman We always try to do this, and being here in person is more fun for us and probably more fun for the people watching, but we try to make it always fun.

[SPEAKER_03] Reid Hoffman Absolutely. So no surprise, we're going to talk about AI, we're going to talk about profitability, we're going to end with some politics. But let's start off, for those listeners who don't know, you in the last year or so founded a company called Manus AI with Siddhartha Mukherjee, who is the Pulitzer Prize winning writer of Emperor of All Maladies. Reid Hoffman And the pitch when it launched was ambitious. Take drug discovery from a decade-long process to just a few years.

[SPEAKER_03] Can you give our listeners an update on where you are right now with Manus AI?

[SPEAKER_01] Reid Hoffman So, you know, AI compression was actually

[SPEAKER_03] two years, right?

[SPEAKER_01] But yes. So look, one of the things that we were just reviewing, and you were in the meeting, we were reviewing kind of like where we've been. And one of the things that was an interesting reflection is, look, one can argue there's a theme in Silicon Valley that like the language AI chatbot is basically done with, you know, open AI as a leader, followed by, you know, Gemini and Claude and so forth. The coding is basically done with Claude co-pilot and open AI codecs.

[SPEAKER_01] And, you know, maybe Google and Microsoft will get in the mix. They're going to work to do that. But that's done. But then actually, in fact, now it's the time for medicine. And what people don't realize is that medicines, like they're all like, like, they're like, actually, I'll use this pun because it's fun. They're googly-eyed about the, like the anthropic revenue thing. And medicines are massively larger TAMs. Like when you discover an amazing medicine and what we're doing at Manus is creating a drug

[SPEAKER_01] discovery factory for monopolies because drugs are essentially legal 20-year-long monopolies. And it was like, yep. And we've actually already kind of discovered novel chemistry. We've done a whole bunch, like in our building of these models from scratch and having taken the time to do this, Shana Ujwal Singh has been the absolute perfect co-founder or CTO in doing this.

[SPEAKER_01] And it's like, yep, we're on target and we're going places and we know things that other people don't know. And so that's awesome. And obviously, eventually we'll get to more public statements. I mean, there's obviously a version of public statements, but it's like, no, no, no. We want to have it more locked down and more like as opposed to pre-announcing, you announce what you've done versus you announce what you're going to do. But it was a really exciting couple o...

AI’s hidden 20-year monopoly

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.

AI’s hidden 20-year monopoly

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.