Two biotech companies claim they use AI to design drugs from scratch. Do they?

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Absci and Generate say they use AI to make drugs. Do they?

Awesome story alert: In the race to use novel computational techniques to develop drugs, a number of companies have declared, perhaps prematurely, that their experimental compounds are developed by artificial intelligence. In a new deep dive, STAT’s Brittany Trang examines the efforts of Generate Biomedicines and Absci, and finds that both companies hype their AI abilities in ways that are emblematic of how “AI pharma and biotech companies’ breathless claims can potentially mislead anyone not intimately familiar with the details of drug development, or machine learning.”

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