Visible success means an approved medicine with a demonstrated patient-relevant benefit, whose design depended substantially on AI in a way that would have been hard to match by other means. A molecule entering trials is not success; it is entry into the filters.
Why counting molecules misleads
The number of AI-originated molecules entering trials can grow quickly, because entering is cheap relative to everything that follows. The number that reach patients grows only when candidates survive every filter. Watching entries therefore tells you about activity, not about impact. The informative quantity is the survival rate through each filter and whether it has changed.
The word "AI-assisted" covers a wide range
A model proposing a new molecular scaffold and a model ranking existing compounds are both computational contributions, but they test different claims. When you read that a drug is AI-designed, the meaningful question is what the model actually decided, and whether a human team could have reached the same place at comparable cost.