Google Disbands Nobel-Winning AlphaFold Team

Google has disbanded the AlphaFold programme team at DeepMind, two years after two scientists won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work within the unit. The Financial Times reported the dissolution, noting that several key team members and paper authors are now working on projects concerning Gemini and other scientific research. Meanwhile, some individuals left the company after the team was wound up. Google told the Times that some staff were transferred to projects focused on Gemini and others to Isomorphic Labs, the Alphabet-owned drug innovation firm and a spin-off from DeepMind. The Times reported that Google’s decision to dissolve AlphaFold was a way to allocate more resources to Gemini’s development. Pushmeet Kohli, Vice President of Research at Google DeepMind, said the company’s strategy has evolved from what it had pursued over the past several years. ‘Our strategy for the last nine years has been to focus on grand challenges, concrete goals that each project focuses on. That strategy has evolved,’ he explained. DeepMind developed AlphaFold in 2018. The AI programme accurately predicts the three-dimensional structure of proteins from amino acid sequences in a matter of minutes. The programme quickly achieved success, being hailed in 2020 as the solution to the 50-year-old ‘protein folding problem’ of how amino acids form complex 3D shapes. The AlphaFold team built on previous work by feeding that data into AI to train the programme. In 2024, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and John Jumper received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold. Jumper himself left DeepMind last June, following several other staff members to the AI giant Anthropic.