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Google quietly dismantles Nobel-winning AlphaFold team, pivots to Gemini

A Nobel Prize-winning achievement is being quietly dismantled by its own creator. According to media reports, Google's AI laboratory DeepMind has disbanded the team behind AlphaFold—the system that predicted the three-dimensional structure of proteins, which brought CEO Demis Hassabis and research scientist Jiaopeng Jiang to the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry podium.

Over the past year, this quiet dismantling has unfolded gradually through personnel changes. Most of the original authors of the AlphaFold paper have been reassigned to other teams; among those still full-time employees at DeepMind, nearly a quarter have left the company entirely. Those who remain have been assigned to projects centered around the Gemini large language model, or new areas such as enzyme design, nuclear fusion, and genomics; others have moved to Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery company under Alphabet.

Pushmeet Kohli, DeepMind's vice president of research, revealed the essence of this restructuring. He founded and led the "AI for Science" team, which had set a nine-year plan: focusing on major scientific challenges and ensuring each project revolved around clear objectives. He now admits that this strategy has changed. DeepMind no longer focuses solely on single scientific problems like protein folding, but instead shifts its focus to building systems driven by Gemini that assist scientists and eventually automate parts of the research process. At the same time, it is also competing with OpenAI and Anthropic for the most advanced AI agents.

The most noticeable talent drain occurred within the core team. Early this year, Jiang and another AlphaFold researcher, Adler, joined Google's "Code Strike" team—a group formed to catch up with Anthropic and OpenAI and enhance AI programming capabilities. Last month, Jiang announced his departure to join Anthropic, while Adler and AlphaFold colleague Pritzel followed suit. A DeepMind employee who did not want to be named said these three were "key, important, and core members," and their departure caused a stir within the company.

Key Points

  • DeepMind has disbanded the AlphaFold team, reassigning most members to Gemini-related projects or other areas.
  • Nearly a quarter of the original AlphaFold paper authors have left the company.
  • Key researchers, including Nobel laureate Jiaopeng Jiang, have moved to competitors like Anthropic.
  • The shift reflects a strategic pivot from focused scientific challenges to building AI agents for science.