[randcraw]

Mostly hype. Yes, automating drug discovery to any extent is utterly hopeless, and as likely to impact the pharma business any time as autonomous killer robots overrunning the battlefield -- Not In My Lifetime.

But AI definitely has a near term future in addressing well formed questions like specific assays or searching for well-constrained targets, like ligand matches. The trick is for the AI contributor TO LEARN SOMETHING ABOUT THE DAMNED DOMAIN. Unless the chemist/biologist is intimately involved in the task, the AI provider is shooting blind. But with many wise eyes on the ball, even the hardest problems becomes a lot more assailable.

[I say this as someone who processes images and analyzes data within a big pharma, and has seen several grand IT plans fail (like systems biology disease modeling) and many small & specific scientist-assistance tasks succeed.]