I was thinking of going into that field. Can you expand a bit on why you left?
I spent 15 years trying to be a professor and failed miserably. I was bad at it and didn't like what professors have to do.
I then moved to industry to be a random engineer and thrived doing things entirely unrelated to drug discovery. Eventually, I convinced my company to invest heavily in life sciences. This was successful and I was on track to be a powerful player (a "research engineer", just like the DM folks who are building these things) in this space, when the project got very popular and I was elbowed aside by others who are more aggressive. So I went back to being a programmer again, it's much less stressful, pays better, and realistically, much of my time is just telling scientists what I would do if I was in their place anyway.
"Don't swim with the sharks if you don't like being bitten"
That sounds familiar. I guess they mostly don't listen, whatever your record -- especially if it was in a different field they could learn from -- but I hope it's not always like that.
They hide all of that under "I'm a scientist, you're not".
Tech (at its best) hates credentialism (sometimes I think to a point of over-correction).
That said, 80% of the devs in the bay area seem to have gone to Stanford or MIT, so...
It doesn't look like the models produced by this would immediately turn the challenging problem of finding, approving, and marketing successful pharmaceuticals (IE, it doesn't eliminate any real bottleneck).
There was a long-term dream of structure-based drug discovery based on docking, but IMO, it has never really proved itself (most of the examples of success are cherry picked from a much larger pile of massive failures).