Comment by siver_john

I mean nothing is stopping you from skipping validation with pre-alphafold techniques and say for drug discovery to already do drug screening using the predicted structure. It's just the drug screening software is already error prone so you are still going to have to do some validation. However having an idea on a potential structure means that you can do other techniques that are simpler to validate it that are less expensive/time consuming (I'm thinking of things similar to FRET).

Another idea is these may come into play for anti-verification, so if you are drug screening against a known structure. You could potentially use these more flawed structures of proteins you don't want to target but may be similar, and try to reduce the drug's efficacy at binding them. Or something to that effect. All of that is fun ideas that are currently being explored in that space but we'll see where it takes us.