It's important work and a significant effort, but it's not where the actual difficulty in drug development lies. 90% of drugs fail after that point, and that is where you need to get better if you want to beat the current approaches.
AI also can't run drug trials faster than humans. They take a lot of time, effort and money.
Why do you think the status quo is optimal that can’t be accelerated and done at lower cost? Of course AI can’t do trials on its own.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-10-29/china-s-s...
As noted in the article, it's cheaper because regulations appear to be laxer and it's possibly resulted in deaths.
Whether or not that's acceptable is political discussion, not an AI one.
What works for one, kills another.
Just look at what peanuts can do. If your tests don‘t take something like this into account, you get in trouble. And there are lots of those things to test against, known and even unknown.
And then there is evolution. What works today, doesn’t work tomorrow.
AI can help prevent defeat but there is no winning
I mean, you can determine the molecular structure of things. Look at xray and cryo-electron microscopy. Why should that be a topic that can not be solved programmatically?
> The AI would need to be able to predict all effects a specific molecule has on a human.
So you can have fully automated labs. You have organoids that can be combined as a test system (or as pseudo mini brains). Why would that be impossible by AI? I don't understand that assumption. To me, the problem set is finite, so of course it COULD be solved. Which unique feature do humans have that AI could not simulate? We have robots and automated labs. I don't really see why humans would be necessary to find autogenerated drug xyz.
> very unlikely to be more effective than current drug development.
I highly doubt that claim. I more smell that some people are worried about losing overpriced drugs here. Imagine if AI were to lead to cheaper drugs that work perfectly fine still. Personally I'd still prefer to see AI vanish, but that is also unlikely to happen. I don't understand the rationale you give here though. Why can AI not design drugs? What is the real explanation here? I mean, penicillin was invested by fungi and discovered mostly by accident. AI can not have anything like that?