They are already doing that. But you still need chemists because they can make the things and check them and find alternative routes and produce analogues etc

They are already doing that. But you still need chemists because they can make the things and check them and find alternative routes and produce analogues etc There are quite a few tools using DL models that work extremely well to devise synthetic pathways for compounds. But you still need someone to make them. A lot of the easy to automate chemistry (combinatorial chemistry) didn't really give good results compared to the amount of money it gobbled. And these days in chemistry we are seeing a lot of what is happening in the electronics world as well. With a set of companies producing different materials and executing different parts of the process for another one (think Apple cpus with the whole chain from the Swiss EUV mirror makers, the wafers producers, the machines producers, TSMC that orchestrate the whole thing, etc). Pharma companies are externalizing a these days for the chemistry, the analysis etc.