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Comment by jstummbillig | Hacker News Reader

> - Revenue sharing from drug discovery (called out by OpenAI CFO): Why would a pharma company give away the upside to a commoditized intelligence layer? Why would OpenAI have a more compelling story than Google Deep Mind, which has serious accolades in this space?

I am not sure I follow. They "give it away", because they have to. They have to pay any of the model companies. What do DeepMind's accolades matter if it's commoditized, as you propose?

AI resources will remain scarce for the foreseeable future: I have to literally wait multiple Minutes to get an answer for semi-hard coding problems. The current demand is the delta between this, and the few milliseconds that it could take if supply was there. I suspect the tension will grow. Why would there not be multiple companies positioned to capture value? Assuming that any of them can turn demand into profit, that seems to be the most likely story right now.

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The CFO isn't talking about selling tokens to pharma companies. There's no money in that. She proposed revenue sharing. In this scenario, OpenAI's AI service helps discover drug candidates, and shares the IP ownership of the candidate (which is basically a risky bet that it will get through clinical trials and be profitable). Biotech is a complicated market filled with smart people and great negotiators - they dont give away IP ownership without a lot of thought.

If OpenAI wants anything more valuable than selling tokens, they will need to offer something valuable and differentiated. Right now they are not differentiated in the space at all. Look up "OpenAI Biotech" - anything that they've built themselves?

If any company will have a new product that biotech companies will pay top dollar for, its Google. Deepmind has been in biology (proteins) for almost a decade and they it has subsidiaries like Isomorphic Labs that are bringing products to market.

> OpenAI's AI service helps discover drug candidates

This has never been the difficult/expensive part of drug development.

His point is AI's already getting commodified. So OpenAI won't get a portion of the profits or revenue sharing, it'll be a simple transaction. They simply pay for compute time.

It's like pretending sulphuric acid manufacturers would get the right to demand a portion of drug company profits.

Big pharma might choose to pay full cost to get reasonable speed. To get to a partnership that looks a lot like tenant farming you would need a model that is actually 100X better at drug discovery than any other model, Why would that be OpenAI instead of deepmind? Not that either is likely worth much premium.

Generally, I think only penny stock pharma cares at all to deal with IP with any kind of baggage instead of having already forgotten it in the backlog.

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