Google DeepMind Disbands Nobel Prize-Winning AlphaFold Team

According to the UK's Financial Times (FT), Google DeepMind has disbanded the development team behind the AI model "AlphaFold," which won the Nobel Prize for protein structure prediction. Most of the paper's co-authors have been reassigned to departments such as enzyme design, nuclear fusion, genomics, and Gemini-related projects within the past year; some members transferred to Isomorphic Labs, a new drug R&D subsidiary under Alphabet, while another quarter of full-time employees have left. DeepMind Vice President of Research Pushmeet Kohli 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 competing in frontier AI agent development with OpenAI, Anthropic, and others.