Are LLMs doing drug discovery? To my knowledge, that’s all classic “machine learning”

Not yet, as far as I know, but perhaps someone will find a way to do that in the future. We're talking about the next two decades here, a lot can happen in that time.

DNA itself can be thought of as a language which describes proteins, and I personally don't know enough about the limits of LLMs as a technology to claim that it can never be adapted to, say, do reverse translation from desired protein shapes into DNA sequences.

	▲	pixl97 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is why it's better to call the underlying technology transformers rather than 'language model'. It can make a model from anything you can digitize and is informational (random noise would not be informational for example). It's the relations between the bits of data that matters.