Schrödinger CEO talks about making physics the basis of AI drug discovery | Status

Schrödinger CEO Ramy Farid wants you to know that his company is not an AI company…but call it that if you want.

Founded in 1990, the company began by creating software that painstakingly and accurately predicts how molecules will interact in space using fundamental laws of physics. These calculations were rooted in the field of computational physics and required large amounts of expensive and time-consuming computing power to perform. And many have abandoned those techniques in favor of simpler techniques that take in large amounts of data and approximate predicted results. So-called “artificial intelligence”.

But as the computing world ditched central processing units in favor of more powerful graphics processing units, Schrödinger’s calculations were able to run faster. After that, physics-based predictions began to work, Farid said, which were more accurate than machine learning’s pattern recognition approximations.