DeepMind research VP says science team has not pivoted

In a post on X on 30 July, Kohli said the DeepMind Science team has not pivoted at all and has expanded its work. He listed protein function, genome decoding, de-novo protein and enzyme design, and Gemini-powered agents meant to speed up research. The culture at Google DeepMind, he said, is to empower scientists who have agency over which hard goals they choose to chase.

What the FT reported

The Financial Times reported on 29 July that DeepMind had dismantled the AlphaFold team, citing an analysis of recent job moves and company insiders. Most of the original AlphaFold paper authors had been reassigned over the past year, the report said. Nearly a quarter of the full-time DeepMind authors on those papers have left the company altogether.

Engadget reported that DeepMind confirmed to the Times that staff had moved internally to Gemini-focused projects. It also confirmed moves to Isomorphic Labs, enzyme design, nuclear fusion and genomics. AlphaFold itself and related services will not be discontinued, GIGAZINE reported, citing the FT.

Nobel winners and departures

Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold. Jumper announced in June that he was leaving DeepMind to join Anthropic. Core AlphaFold researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel also left for Anthropic, which has launched a workbench called Claude Science for biology and drug discovery.

Jumper and Adler had earlier been moved onto Code Strike, Google's internal team set up to close the gap with Anthropic and OpenAI on coding. One DeepMind employee told the FT the three were "instrumental, important, core members" whose exits "sparked surprise internally."

Strategy shift

Kohli told the FT that the lab's approach had changed. "Our strategy over the last nine years has been to focus on grand challenges... a concrete goal every project is focused on," he said. "The strategy has evolved." Instead of one team per problem, DeepMind says it is building Gemini-powered systems to assist scientists and eventually automate parts of the research process.

A DeepMind spokesperson told Engadget that many of the researchers behind AlphaFold "continue today to drive scientific and technological advances across Google, Google DeepMind, and Isomorphic Labs."

What AlphaFold leaves behind

AlphaFold's free protein structure predictions support drug discovery and disease research worldwide. DeepMind started AlphaFold in 2018. In 2020, AlphaFold 2 was recognized as a solution to the 50-year protein-folding problem, predicting 3D structures in minutes rather than years. The AlphaFold database gives researchers free access to over 200 million predictions. Before the model arrived, scientists had identified the structures of roughly 170,000 proteins over 50 years using X-ray and nuclear magnetic resonance.

Isomorphic Labs, the drug-discovery arm DeepMind spun out in 2021, works with Novartis and Eli Lilly.