Schrödinger CEO Ramy Farid wants you to know that his company isn’t an AI company…but he’ll call it that if you want to.
The company, founded in 1990, started out by making software that used the basic laws of physics to laboriously and exactly predict how molecules will interact with each other in space. Those calculations, rooted in the field of computational physics, needed lots of expensive and time-consuming computing power to run, and many people abandoned those techniques in favor of easier techniques that took in tons of data and approximated the predicted results, which eventually became called “artificial intelligence.”
But as the computing world ditched central processing units for the more powerful graphics processing units, Schrödinger’s computations became faster to run. Its physics-based predictions, more accurate than the approximations made by machine learning’s pattern recognition, then began to work, said Farid.
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