> The problem is the clinical trial. [...] That's the part that takes years and tens of millions of dollars.
Clinical trials only start after about five years of research and development. While they do represent a large part of the budget (even in the hundreds of millions of dollars), there are countless of other necessary steps before, during, and after trials to ensure that drugs are both safe and effective. The problem is that we still don't understand how most of these molecules behave in the body, and how we can produce them reliably and efficiently enough, which brings me to the next point:
> [...] but did it do anything for the problem of putting chemicals in people?
Yes, there are plenty of problems that AI and computational chemistry already help with in the pharmaceutical industry, including predicting solubility, stability, crystallization, granulation, toxicity, pharmacokinetics, developing the formulation, optimizing and scaling up both the synthesis and production process, developing appropriate techniques for quality control, and so on.
In all these cases and more, AI can help reduce the amount of experiments that need to be done in the lab, which require highly specialized equipment, personnel, and a lot of time. Oh and design of experiments is also a very important topic, again aiming at reducing the amount of lab time needed.
Admittedly, most of these things aim at ensuring that we do not put the wrong chemical in people, but they do represent most of the R&D effort spent in pharma, and reducing everything to clinical trials is not correct. There is a very wide gap between "AI will design drugs entirely on its own" and "AI is useless".