Zhavoronkov says his drug is special because AI software not only helped decide what target inside a cell to interact with, but also what the drug's chemical structure should be. Popular forms of AI can draw pictures and answer questions. But there's a growing effort to get AI to dream up cures for awful diseases, too. That may be why Jensen Huang, president of Nvidia, which sells AI chips and servers, claimed in December that "digital biology" is going to be the "next amazing revolution" for AI. "This is going to be flat out one of the biggest ones ever," he said.

Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and pretty much every other tech company are investing billions into artificial intelligence, making great strides in building smarter software and hardware. But in a Reddit AMA (ask me anything) session, Microsoft cofounder and richest man in the world Bill Gates replied to a question about the advancement he most wants to see in his lifetime by indicating that AI can go further still. "The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia," writes Gates. "Right now computers don't know how to represent knowledge so they can't read a text book [sic] and pass a test."