I have nothing against AI as a technology but the notion of it "curing diseases" is so silly. The limiting factors are largely in fundamental biology research and then human clinical trials. There is no plausible way that LLMs will make those activities 10× faster or cheaper. Hard work still has to be done in the messy real world outside of computers.
But what if we could predict which treatments would be most successful with ~70% accuracy? It would potentially speed up the feedback loops right?
There may also be downsides, like skipping testing things that would enhance our fundamental understanding of something because the AI was wrong. But that’s already a problem , and having a better gauge in the early stages could be really helpful
What if I could flap my arms and fly to the moon? You haven't presented any scientific evidence that LLMs will enable such prediction accuracy. It's pure speculation and hope. Some smaller, incremental improvements to optimize research workflows are much more likely.
Not really, you still have to validate the structures it estimates, which minimises any speed gains.
It can help a little bit in the early stages of drug design, but even if it was perfect (which it's not), there's a massive gap between understanding a protein structure, and understanding how a drug will or system will interact with it.
In a broader sense, understanding the structure of a protein is only a small part of drug development. Unfortunately biology is complicated, and we're an extremely far way away from solving it.
LLMs help already a lot because plenty of normal people do not have programming skills. Evaluating test results is a lot harder if you do not know how to program or how to use a computer.
But LLMs compute requirement is so high that it pushes the boundaries of compute, memory and memory bandwidth which is fundamental for curing diseases.
LLMs math / neural networks can and are used for medical research. Simulating a whole body with proteins, cells etc. will bring us the breakthrough we need.
Nothing in modern medicin research is withoout compute.
More accurate biological simulations could help but there is zero reason to expect that LLMs will be an effective platform for such simulations. That's pure speculation and probably wrong.
