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.…