Google Reshuffles Nobel-Winning DeepMind AI Team

Google DeepMind has reportedly disbanded the team behind its Nobel Prize-winning Alpha Fold AI system.

That’s according to a report Wednesday (July 29) from the Financial Times (FT), which frames the move as Google overhauling a research strategy that made DeepMind one of the top AI laboratories.

Most of the original authors of the AlphaFold papers have been reassigned in the last year, the report said, citing an FT analysis of recent job moves and sources familiar with the matter.

The company confirmed that the employees have moved to projects dealing with Google’s Gemini large language model, plus areas like enzyme design, nuclear fusion and genomics, the FT added.

Others have moved to Google’s Isomorphic Labs. Almost a quarter of the full-time Google DeepMind authors of the original AlphaFold papers have simply left the company. The FT says this marks a major shift in DeepMind’s scientific strategy following the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) large language models.

“Our strategy over the last nine years has been to focus on grand challenges … a concrete goal every project is focused on,” said Pushmeet Kohli, vice-president of research at Google DeepMind, and founder/head of the AI for Science team. “The strategy has evolved.”

Rather than focusing on single scientific problems, Kohli told the FT, DeepMind is now also concentrating on developing Gemini-powered systems that can help scientists — and someday automate parts of the scientific process — while competing with companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to build frontier AI agents.

The news comes weeks after John Jumper, one of the Nobel Prize-winning scientists behind Alpha Fold, announced he was leaving the company to join Anthropic.

In other Google AI news, PYMNTS wrote this week about new research at the company showing that workers in predominantly physical and manual roles, such as auto technicians and industrial mechanics, are using conversational AI for real-time diagnostics, troubleshooting and on-the-job learning.

The company’s research also found that workplace AI now touches 68% of jobs, representing 90% of employment in the U.S. However, within any single job, employees use it for about 21% of their tasks on average.

“Blue-collar workers tend to be using a lot of what we call multimodal AI, which is AI with images and video,” Scott Strand, head of strategic operations and special projects for technology and society at Google, told Axios last week.