Martin Shkreli — who earned the nickname "pharma bro" after his pharmaceutical company dramatically increased the price of an older drug, and he was eventually sentenced to seven years in prison for securities fraud — revealed he has been working on a virtual healthcare assistant.
In an April 20 blog post, Mr. Shkreli said the healthcare virtual assistant, dubbed DrGupta.AI, would be able to help patients "access health information and simulate interactions with a physician."
In the post, Mr. Shkreli blamed high healthcare costs on physician decisions and argued that healthcare is more expensive due to a "constrained supply of healthcare professionals."
Mr. Shkreli said a remedy for this could be large language models such as ChatGPT.
"Dr. Gupta may not be ready to replace physicians entirely, but I believe it has the potential to be a valuable resource for many individuals," Mr. Shkreli wrote.
DrGupta.AI, according to Mr. Shkreli, can perform tasks such as interpreting medical papers, textbooks or news articles.
The move comes shortly after a federal court banned him from serving as an executive or director at a public company. But, according to the the Federal Trade Commission, he has violated this order by forming and operating a new company called Druglike.
According to a court document filed Jan. 20, Mr. Shkreli did not comply with the FTC's requests to submit documents and be interviewed concerning the new company.