Google DeepMind Disbands Nobel Prize-Winning AlphaFold Team

TechFlow news, July 29: According to a report by the UK's Financial Times (FT), Google DeepMind has disbanded the development team for the AI model "AlphaFold," which won the Nobel Prize for protein structure prediction. Most of the paper's co-authors have been reassigned within the past year to departments including enzyme design, nuclear fusion, genomics, and Gemini-related projects; some members transferred to Isomorphic Labs, a new drug research and development subsidiary under Alphabet, while another quarter of full-time employees have left. Pushmeet Kohli, DeepMind's Vice President of Research, stated that the company's strategy has shifted from focusing on single scientific challenges to building Gemini-based systems to support scientists and drive automation of scientific processes, while simultaneously competing with OpenAI, Anthropic, and others in the race to develop cutting-edge AI agents.