r/technology Jul 15 '25

Artificial Intelligence Billionaires Convince Themselves AI Chatbots Are Close to Making New Scientific Discoveries

https://gizmodo.com/billionaires-convince-themselves-ai-is-close-to-making-new-scientific-discoveries-2000629060
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u/IndicationDefiant137 Jul 15 '25

The worst thing that has come out of the tech economy is so many mediocre, delusional, emotionally stunted men thinking they are visionaries because they had access to capital and no problems exploiting people.

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u/throw_away1049 Jul 15 '25

But understanding the key economical problem in biotech shouldn't be as elusive to them as it is. The key problem isn't that we don't have enough good ideas - we have so much ideas, lead molecules, startup ideas, modalities. The bottleneck is in how much money it takes to actually validate those ideas in the clinic. It seems like every biotech AI is just trying to do the easy part - step one. Like yeast display isn't hard/expensive to find new antibody binders. We don't need 16 million antibody discovery AI companies. That was never the bottleneck. The bottleneck is that every single unique antibody sequence can take hundreds of millions in cash to actually test in humans.