AI curing cancer has become a meme. This Google researcher is actually trying to do it. - Business Insider

Ah, the old 'AI cures cancer' meme — a reliable punchline at tech conferences since at least 2015, usually served alongside 'blockchain fixes democracy' and 'metaverse is the future'. Now Google researcher Yossi Matias has decided to actually try, armed with something called AI Co-Scientist, which generates and ranks hypotheses for drug discovery. Because nothing says 'rigorous scientific method' like letting a large language model churn out research ideas while you sit back with a coffee.

The tool is designed to 'accelerate' drug discovery, which in practice means it will probably propose 47 variants of 'just hit it with CRISPR' before suggesting something actually useful. Matias is clearly sincere, but so were the Google Health doctors who promised AI could read chest X-rays better than radiologists — until it turned out the model just learned to recognise the hospital scanner's brand. The gap between meme and reality is vast, but at least this time the joke is free to use.

Of course, the real test is whether AI Co-Scientist will actually produce a testable hypothesis that survives peer review, rather than just a preprint on arXiv and a press release with 'breakthrough' in the headline. We've seen this film before — the AI solves protein folding, the AI writes poetry, the AI passes the bar exam. But cancer is a collection of hundreds of diseases, not a puzzle box with a single answer. Still, if it fails, there's always next year's meme.