Almost a quarter of the full-time researchers who wrote the original AlphaFold papers have left Google Deepmind entirely. The Financial Times reports that the majority of the team behind the project are now working on other assignments.
Google Deepmind has broken up the unit responsible for AlphaFold. Most of the original authors of the papers were reassigned internally over the past year.
Deepmind confirmed the moves. The researchers are now working on projects built around Google’s Gemini large language model, as well as enzyme design, nuclear fusion, and genomics. Others transferred to Isomorphic Labs, the Alphabet subsidiary focused on drug discovery that was spun out of Deepmind in 2021 and has partnerships with Novartis and Eli Lilly. Nearly a quarter of the full-time Google Deepmind authors of the original AlphaFold papers have left the company entirely, according to the FT.
AlphaFold, developed starting in 2018, predicts the three-dimensional structure of proteins. John Jumper, vice president and engineering fellow, and Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the work. The project became the defining example of Deepmind’s strategy of pursuing long-term scientific breakthroughs through dedicated research teams.
That approach is now being abandoned. “Our strategy over the last nine years has been to focus on grand challenges . . . a concrete goal every project is focused on,” Pushmeet Kohli, vice president of research at Google Deepmind, where he founded and leads the AI for Science team, told the FT. “The strategy has evolved.”
Rather than simply organizing researchers around single scientific problems like protein folding, the lab is now also building Gemini-powered systems that can assist scientists and eventually automate parts of the scientific process. At the same time, Deepmind is competing with OpenAI and Anthropic to build frontier AI agents.
Key talent is heading to rivals
The departures hit the inner circle. Earlier this year, Jumper and fellow AlphaFold researcher Jonas Adler moved to Google’s internal “Code Strike” team, a group assembled to improve the company’s AI coding capabilities as it seeks to catch Anthropic and OpenAI. Last month, Jumper announced his move to Anthropic, where he’ll be joined by Adler and AlphaFold colleague Alexander Pritzel.
One Deepmind employee, who asked not to be named, told the FT that all three had been “instrumental, important, core members” of the company and that their departures had sparked surprise internally.
Deepmind said it is “incredibly proud” of its scientific heritage and the global impact of AlphaFold, “which inspired the launch of Isomorphic Labs with the mission to reimagine drug discovery.” Anthropic launched Claude Science for biology and drug discovery earlier this year.
What it means
For the scientists using these tools, the shift means the focus moves from solving one specific problem to building systems that can handle a wider range of tasks. Researchers may see more automation in their workflows, but the specific goal-oriented nature of the original AlphaFold team is gone. The lab is now aligning its efforts with the broader push from companies like Anthropic to create general-purpose AI agents.
