Why AI Won't Shortcut Drug Discovery
Source: a16z
The venture capital narrative around AI-powered drug discovery treats molecular biology as a pure information problem solvable by scaling compute and model sophistication. The actual bottleneck is experimental validation and unknown biological complexity. Andreessen Horowitz's argument cuts against its own industry's hype cycle: even with perfect computational predictions, the wet-lab work, regulatory pathways, and fundamental biological surprises remain time-intensive and irreducible. Venture funding that treats biology as software-complete is capital deployed away from the grinding infrastructure—biotech manufacturing, clinical trial design, disease modeling—where pharmaceutical velocity actually lives.