Google Disbands AlphaFold Team Behind Nobel Prize, Shifts Focus to Gemini and Science Agent

According to Dynamic Beating monitoring, Google DeepMind has disbanded the original AlphaFold team. Over the past year, most of the authors have been reassigned to projects such as Gemini, enzyme design, nuclear fusion, and genomics. Close to a quarter of the full-time authors have left the company.

AlphaFold, which can predict the 3D structure of proteins, helped Demis Hassabis and John Jumper win the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It is also a representative project of DeepMind's past approach of focusing a team on solving a single scientific problem.

This single-minded approach is no longer the sole focus. DeepMind is now more interested in using Gemini to build a general-purpose scientific assistant to help researchers accomplish more work and gradually automate parts of the research process.

In June of this year, Jumper announced his move to Anthropic. AlphaFold core members Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel will also be joining him. The achievements of AlphaFold are still being used for drug discovery by Isomorphic Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet.