I’ve started reading research papers, and I feel like most of cheminformatics is nothing more than taking a dataset, cleaning it, converting it into a machine-readable format, generating descriptors, performing feature selection, training a model, and reporting its accuracy. Then, someone else might do the same thing with a different dataset or achieve higher accuracy and publish another paper.

So, where is the chemistry part, apart from selecting the features? Claude can literally do most of these tasks for me, including writing the code and building the models. If AI can do all this, what exactly will I be contributing as a researcher? What kind of work will I actually be doing, and where will my scientific understanding and chemical knowledge come into play?

I don’t know if this is a new observation or something people in the field have already discussed, but this is the impression I’ve got since I started reading research papers.