Daphne Koller says AI will help biology, but biology is still too poorly understood

DaphneKoller · x · 2026-08-04

Daphne Koller argues that AI will eventually transform human health, but rejects the idea that a clever enough reasoner can simply infer cures from existing biological knowledge.
She notes that only about a quarter of human diseases have an approved therapy, and more than 90% of drugs entering clinical trials still fail.
In her view, many failures are not because the molecules are poorly engineered, but because the underlying biological mechanism was misunderstood from the start.
The attached Insitro image frames the essay as a “Deep Phenotype” theme: scaling biology and deep causality, not just scaling model capacity.

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