One might argue that we have calibrated drug safety to such a high degree that the aggregate negative social impacts are far higher than the costs of side effects. Of course we don’t want another thalidomide catastrophe but I think there are large potential test groups to mine who are much less sensitive to the risks. For example, the elderly and those with terminal diagnoses. Right now we only permit drug testing in very limited cases for the latter group, and only when the treatment is related to their terminal diagnosis. I’m seeing older people taking all kinds of experimental anti-aging drugs right now, either off label, or novel. We’re not collecting any of this data empirically because what they’re doing is not legal.

Further, [we are getting much better at simulating drug interactions.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41155903/) I strongly suspect AI will offer new probabilistic models to funnel novel drugs into more targeted trials which are much more likely to succeed. If we had 90% certainty of success and high certainty of lower adverse reactions I think we could allow much less stringent human trials. That means much lower cost and much faster turn-around.

this hot take is more important than we all think. While adding features is more optimised than ever (e.g. auto software development) many systems and processes are fairly optimised already. Many agent implementations I have seen don't optimise the process but replicate/automate it. This has made me think that some things are already optimised, there is always room for improvement but those gains might not weigh up always in the race use AI for everything.

But if that 20% is not the bottleneck then at most your market is replacing the labor required to get that 20% to the next phase, plus you will probably not be able to capture full value here because of lab/model competition.

It’s only a benefit if it doesn’t bog the next stage down in noise. At that point it could be detrimental.

We already see that with software. It will be exactly the same with drug design.

My daughter is a leading biochem at one of the big pharma companies and that’s their principal worry about this. It’s really easy to create a lot of information these days which compromises the entire process.

It's also not the magical thing that will solve all diseases like some people who are starting to think we're going to enter the singularity soon seem to think.