I also work in drug discovery, and I completely agree; the extent to which the actual causal mechanisms of the efficacy of many drugs is woefully short of some human-appreciable first-principles based explanation. The point is especially undercut by hypothetically suggesting that this drug /does/ in fact pass stage 3 trials, at which point I can't fathom anyone would have a problem advancing it.

Really wish he had chosen a different example; this particular bullet point has been making the rounds on X/twitter to paint Tao as an example of some sort of gatekeeping luddite who would deny the world a post-abundance future in order to maintain the prestige of his particular career path...which is tough because I cannot think of a more responsible steward of our inevitable AI future than Tao at the moment.

The conflations about his example ("thought experiment") is twofold, the AI itself confounds the ethical intuition so it is wrong directly compare against what real medicine today does; furthermore, the very admission that real medicine in fact operates through unknown risks (e.g. Jannsen vaccine recall) is different than having a scientific standard that it should not have to be that way at least as minimally as possible.