Less than a year ago, AlphaFold won Google DeepMind a Nobel Prize. Now DeepMind has taken the team that built it apart.
The lab has reassigned most of the original AlphaFold-paper authors over the past year, the Financial Times reported. Nearly a quarter of them have left the company altogether. DeepMind confirmed the moves, and is folding the work into a wider push around Gemini.
From one grand challenge to the ‘AI scientist’
AlphaFold was the purest expression of DeepMind’s old strategy: point a dedicated team at one hard problem and solve it. It cracked the 50-year protein-folding problem, Engadget noted, predicting 3D protein shapes in minutes. It now underpins drug discovery and disease research worldwide.
That model is now on the way out. “Our strategy over the last nine years has been to focus on grand challenges,” DeepMind research VP Pushmeet Kohli told the FT. “The strategy has evolved.” Instead of one team per problem, the lab is now building Gemini-powered systems meant to assist scientists and automate parts of research itself.
