The writer is a biologist, general partner of Air Street Capital and co-author of State of AI Report
In late February, an artificial intelligence algorithm created by MIT researchers made front-page news for discovering a powerful new antibiotic that could save millions of lives by treating drug-resistant diseases. Yet for many people, what was notable about the moment was that it wasn’t surprising: we have become accustomed to a steady drumbeat of AI breakthroughs.
Just three weeks later, the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic. Geeks around the world sprang into action. A company called C3.ai compiled data sets for AI researchers to crunch. The AI-first drug discovery company Recursion released a morphological image data set of Covid-19 infected cells as they react to thousands of drugs. DeepMind used its AlphaFold AI system to predict and publish structures associated with coronavirus.