I used to work at a drug discovery startup. A simple model generating directly from latent space 'discovered' some novel interactions that none of our medicinal chemists noticed e.g. it started biasing for a distribution of molecules that was totally unexpected for us.
Our chemists were split: some argued it was an artifact, others dug deep and provided some reasoning as to why the generations were sound. Keep in mind, that was a non-reasoning, very early stage model with simple feedback mechanisms for structure and molecular properties.
In the wet lab, the model turned out to be right. That was five years ago. My point is, the same moment that arrived for our chemists will be arriving soon for theoreticians.
Our chemists were split: some argued it was an artifact, others dug deep and provided some reasoning as to why the generations were sound. Keep in mind, that was a non-reasoning, very early stage model with simple feedback mechanisms for structure and molecular properties.
In the wet lab, the model turned out to be right. That was five years ago. My point is, the same moment that arrived for our chemists will be arriving soon for theoreticians.