That is not true. For many diseases we lack good hypotheses about the underlying causal mechanisms which resulted in decades and billions being pumped into few questionable targets (e.g. amyloid and alzheimers). In other diseases such as many cancers we often lack "actionable" targets, resulting in hundreds me-too companies all chasing the same target with only subtle variations in approach (inefficient capital alocation).

So AI could help a lot in discovery, much more than the engineering like uses in antibody/drug optimization.

If you can increase the fidelity of your research model (in-silico, murine, etc) to real life humans then there are fewer false leads.

The real problem is generating leads that are more likely to yield positive results than throwing darts at hypotheses.

That's what top-tier scientists are good at.

"The problem was never generating leads" is an absurd statement without any reference to the quality of those leads. Ideally you want a system able to generate one more lead, the correct one.

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