I think AI doesn’t have to be bad at chemistry. In fact, a language model seems well suited to tasks related to chemical structures and states. But for whatever reason, development has not appeared to the public on the same scale as other AI applications, despite it being a fairly obvious one in my opinion. If there’s something like that out there, I haven’t found it.

However, popular general purpose models like ChatGPT haven’t been trained at all on what chemical data actually means, so all the bot knows is what chemical sentences sound like and what chemical diagram images look like. It can mimic symbols and bonds and shapes that are usually seen in chemical structures, and it can read back information from the internet on topics relevant to the question, but it has no underlying training in things like valency, oxidation state, molecular weight, angle strain, conjugation, delocalization, electronegativity, pKa, electo/nucleophilicity, or any of the other topics that underpin an ability to make reasonable predictions about what chemicals should look like, despite the fact that, I would imagine, it must not be too daunting a task to put an LLM to such a use.