alt Hacker NewsWe don't need an army of high school sophomores, unless they are in the lab pipetting. The expensive part of drug discovery is not the ideation phase, it is the time and labor spent running experiments and synthesizing analogues.
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It sounds like you're suggesting that we need machines that mass produce things like automated pipetting machines and the robots that glue those sorts of machines together.
Also clinical trials
So pharmaceutical research is largely an engineering problem, of running experiments and synthesizing molecules as fast, cheap and accurate as possible ?
This is the general problem with nearly all of this era of generative AI and why the public dislike it so much.
It is trained on human prose; human prose is primarily a representation of ideas; it synthesizes ideas.
There are very few uses for a machine to create ideas. We have a wealth of ideas and people enjoy coming up with ideas. It’s a solution built for a problem that does not exist.
As discussed elsewhere, Deepmind are also working on extending Alphafold to simulate biochemical pathways and then looking to tackle whole-cell simulation. It's not quite pipetting, but this sort of AI scientist would likely be paired with the simulation environment (essentially as function calling), to allow for very rapid iteration of in-silico research.