alt Hacker NewsLast I checked machine learning wasnt the bottleneck for drug discovery and where it fits in the research process was largely solved 5+ years ago.. Weren't there already a ton of ML based drug discovery startups that went out of business, or got aquired, not because they werent useful but because they produced more candidates than the industry could use.
I dont think I want researchers offloading their thinking to some specialty model after seeing what its done to me and my colleagues in software, it certainly isn't making anyone more competent.
It really only enables people to be able to do less novel and lower quality work faster.
OpenAI and Anthropic creating these platforms seems mostly just to create narratives around AI that its going to lead to cures for disease, which it wont, but plenty of normies assume it will cure cancer now. Also a bunch tech oligarchs who are equally convinced or 'one-shot' they're going to live forever because of language models lol.
Promises of the Fountain of Youth continue to be a time tested tools for snake oil salesmen.
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When did you check and what did you find?
For me its not a solved problem and AI/ML would still help to solve plenty Drugdiscovery in itself is such a broad area
There are still normal labs out there doing research for years on one drug alone
And biology of humans is huge and complex, not only is it not solved, its also expensive.
Even if you just not do ML drug discovery, AI can hellp with making the research faster: writing grants, finding issues, creating plans/ideas/suggestions, hepling with finding the newest research, writing code for supporting or analysis, controling microscopes and machines.
This is what I've built my current startup on. We find that ideas, structures and molecules are cheap and actually making them in cells is the issue. Obviously this doesn't apply to small molecules but as groups like Anthropic move closer to Phase I I'm guessing we'll see a lot of frustration with existing CDMO providers like Wuxi or Lonza just like we see with Apple and their woes with Micron etc.