6 ms·
The thing with drug discovery is that the bottleneck is not coming up with new molecules, etc. It's the multi-year, extremely expensive clinical trials that oft
by snek_case 2mo ago
The thing with drug discovery is that the bottleneck is not coming up with new molecules, etc. It's the multi-year, extremely expensive clinical trials that often don't even succeed. I doubt it will be a big moneymaker for Anthropic and OpenAI, because the best they can hope for is to sell a software product to pharma companies, but the pharma companies already have lots of scientists with a million promising molecules already in study they will never even make it to clinical trials.
In other words, can AI tech help? Probably, but I doubt it's going to be a major money maker, and it won't make a ton of money overnight. It's not like Claude Code where every programmer can begin using it instantly.
- ai-x 2mo agoIf you had asked HN 3 years ago what would code-generating market would be, they would have used the exact same reasoning and given us the opinion "Why no one will pay for glorified auto-complete"
- xboxnolifes 2mo agoThr pharma parallel to what tech is doing is replacing clinical trials with AI review. Im not so sure its the same thing.
- Petersipoi 2mo agoThe idea that AI curing cancer, heart disease, aging (you get the idea) won't be a money maker because "clinical trials" is absurd. Of course it will be. Obviously it isn't the same thing as coding agents. But a lot of money makers aren't the same things as coding agents.
- snek_case 2mo agoIn order to cure cancer with AI, you would need to give it complete control over the experimental pipeline, including probably direct robotic access to a web lab, which comes with its own set of risks. It's just not the same problem space as coding at all.