DeepMind has dismantled the team behind AlphaFold, its Nobel Prize‑winning AI system, as the company overhauls its research strategy. The majority of the original authors have been reassigned within DeepMind to projects built around Google’s Gemini large language model, enzyme design, nuclear fusion, genomics, and Alphabet’s drug‑discovery venture Isomorphic Labs. Nearly a quarter of the full‑time Google DeepMind authors of the original AlphaFold papers have left the company entirely.

Pushmeet Kohli, vice‑president of research, explained that the lab’s strategy has evolved from focusing on single scientific challenges to building Gemini‑powered systems that can assist scientists and compete with OpenAI and Anthropic in frontier AI agents. The shift reflects a broader industry view of large language models as catalysts for scientific research.

AlphaFold, developed starting in 2018, transformed biology by predicting protein structures and earned Demis Hassabis a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024. Recent moves saw John Jumper and Jonas Adler join Google’s internal “Code Strike” team and later leave for Anthropic, bringing Alexander Pritzel along.

Isomorphic Labs, spun out in 2021, now partners with Novartis and Eli Lilly to accelerate drug discovery, while competition for top AI scientists intensifies, as noted by OpenAI’s Mark Chen.