Takes years to get new drugs to market. AI is speeding up drug discovery by predicting protein folding ridiculously fast, but there’s a lot of other work that needs to be done. Perhaps there will be models to speed up some of those processes too, but the real bottleneck is approvals and while AI might be used to speed up the paperwork part of it, I can’t think of any way it’ll be able to speed up actual trials. What I suspect will happen is we’ll get an even faster response time with the next global pandemic that requires a vaccine, and we’ll start getting more and more mRNA vaccines, including some for some types of cancers.
This paper details 9 processes in which AI is already helping or is predicted to be able to help in material development. Material development also takes time to get anything to market, for various reasons. But there’s a nonzero chance that the recent battery tech boom from China has been aided by AI. They just tested a very high density solid state cell not long ago.