Comment by timr

Not even close to a relevant metaphor. Compared to drug development, coding is trivial. It was always obvious that coding would be the first to fall: there’s a corpus of all the code ever written, the system is fixed in scope and relatively small, the data is text, and it’s all easily validated by machine for correctness.

There is no objective function you can optimize your way to a drug discovery machine, let alone a fundamental understanding of how the underlying system works.