During a recent interview, Dwarkesh Patel and the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, discussed whether clinical trials will remain a meaningful bottleneck for drug development in the age of AI. Patel said that 'most clinical trials fail because the drug does not work.' In response, Amodei speculated that as AI models get better at designing drugs, 'clinical trials will be much faster ' let's say, they will take one year.' This is a commonly voiced sentiment, but flawed. The truth is that the most significant barriers to progress today are rarely a lack of intelligence. London has a housing crisis even though the technology to design and construct homes has existed for centuries. The bottleneck in housing is not a lack of knowhow, but rather the weaponization of environmental regulations, planning, and NIMBYism. Much the same is true for clinical trials. AI models can help design more elegant molecules, in the same way an architect can use AI to design more efficient floor plans, but...
learn more
