OpenAI digs into the pharmaceutical new battlefield: planning to introduce an "investment + royalty" model, aiming at the forefront of AI biological science.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has stated that the company may consider investing in or subsidizing companies that heavily use its artificial intelligence technology to discover new drugs or therapies, and may potentially charge corresponding patent fees. Speaking at the Cisco Systems, Inc. AI conference on Tuesday, Altman said that AI developers could choose to collaborate with pharmaceutical companies, sharing the costs of using their AI models, and then receive "some royalties" from the discoveries made by that company. He mentioned that the developers of ChatGPT currently do not have such partnerships. He stated, "We're not doing that yet, but I think that the frontier of AI development in scientific discovery requires a lot of funding, so much so that in some cases, we might consider ourselves as investors." OpenAI and its competitors, such as Alphabet Inc. Class C under Alphabet(GOOGL.US) and Anthropic, are increasingly focusing on the application of artificial intelligence in the fields of science and healthcare - from using the technology to assist in guiding new drug research to reviewing individual medical data. Altman's comments provide a clearer understanding of how the company views profiting from its technological breakthroughs. Last month at the World Economic Forum in Davos, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar had stated that the company would extract some revenue from the discoveries made using its AI software. However, Altman clarified that OpenAI would not charge fees to customers who only use its models through an application programming interface (API).