Google DeepMind dismantled and reassigned most of the team behind AlphaFold. The Nobel Prize-winning AI system solved the 50-year-old challenge of protein folding.
The lab is shifting focus toward building large-scale, Gemini-powered AI systems for scientific discovery. This strategic overhaul moves the company away from concentrating on singular scientific problems.
Nearly 25% of the original full-time AlphaFold paper authors have left the company. Nobel laureate John Jumper and two other key researchers are joining competitor Anthropic.
The reorganization signals a new phase for DeepMind to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic. The lab now prioritizes the development of frontier AI agents for science.