Coronavirus triggered a healthcare AI boom. Was it worth it?

In late January, scientists at DeepMind, Google's London-based AI unit, gathered to discuss whether there was anything they could do to help fight the brewing coronavirus pandemic. At the time, the spread of Covid-19 was still largely confined to the city of Wuhan, but as case numbers continued to grow exponentially, machine learning experts from London to San Francisco were gearing up to try and harness the power of AI to fight the Sars-CoV-2 virus. "Our first reaction was to think how we might be able to help," says Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder of DeepMind. "Front of mind was our system, AlphaFold, which we had shown could predict the 3D structure of proteins with unprecedented accuracy compared to other computational methods." At the start of March, DeepMind released predictions generated by AlphaFold for the structures of various proteins associated with SARS-CoV-2, to try and accelerate the process of understanding how the virus functions.