For three weeks last May, employees of the AI giant Nvidia and Recursion Pharmaceuticals slept on the floor of a data center in Salt Lake City. They were there to build a machine that Recursion, a decade-old biotech company, believes will give it an edge in the contest to develop the next great new medicines: BioHive-2, the largest and fastest supercomputer owned by a biopharma. It's an audacious bet that the future of America’s pharmaceutical industry will be as much about computing power as it is about scientific talent.
There’s a reason for the rush: AI-powered drug discovery has been in development for years, but ever since ChatGPT rocketed into the public consciousness in late 2022, the hope and hype around its potential has reached a fever pitch. The question the tech and medical worlds want answered is, when will AI bring its magic to the long, hard, terribly expensive business of pharmaceutical research and development? Is it possible—as OpenAI’s Sam Altman has mused—that one day we’ll simply ask ChatGPT to cure cancer, or Alzheimer’s, or any number of other intractable human diseases?
