Applications Of Generative AI In Drugs Development And Materials Discovery: IP Considerations

1. Introduction

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the buzzword of our time. However, the broad concept of AI, encompassing any method that allows machines to imitate human behaviour, has been around since the early 1950s. Already in the late 1990s, machine learning (ML), a subset of AI where computers learn from data, was applied to many problems in academia and industry thanks to the availability of powerful computer hardware. In 2012, the further specialised subset of ML, deep learning (DL), which focuses on complex data modelling using multi-layer neural networks, proved to be a breakthrough technology but it is only with the debut of the transformer architecture that the impressive generative AI (genAI) applications which we are now experiencing came along. While genAI is revolutionising various fields, the advancements in healthcare and chemistry are massive. The ability of genAI to analyse vast amounts of data and generate predictive models has significantly