DeepMind Won a Nobel for AlphaFold. Then It Broke Up the Team.
Less than a year after AlphaFold won it a Nobel Prize, Google DeepMind has quietly broken up the team behind it. Most of the original authors have been reassigned, nearly a quarter have left, and some have moved to rival companies like Anthropic. The shift marks a turn away from deep-science bets toward the Gemini-powered “AI scientist” race.
Background
July 29, 2026 – 6:44 pm
Image by: Jernej Furman from Slovenia
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, as reported by The Financial Times. Nearly a quarter of them have left the company altogether. DeepMind confirmed the moves, folding the work into a wider push around Gemini.
From Grand Challenges to AI Scientists
AlphaFold represented DeepMind’s old strategy: dedicating a team to one hard problem and solving it. It cracked the 50-year protein-folding problem, as noted by Engadget, predicting 3D protein shapes in minutes. This underpins drug discovery and disease research worldwide.
That model is evolving. "Our strategy over the last nine years has been to focus on grand challenges," said DeepMind research VP Pushmeet Kohli. Now, the lab is building Gemini-powered systems meant to assist scientists and automate parts of research itself.
Talent Scatter
Former AlphaFold staff have scattered to various projects. Some moved to Gemini projects, while others went to enzyme design, nuclear fusion, and genomics. A few joined Isomorphic Labs, an Alphabet drug-discovery spinout inspired by AlphaFold.
The most notable departures were John Jumper (who shared the 2024 Nobel with DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis), Jonas Adler, and Alexander Pritzel, who left for Anthropic in June. A DeepMind employee described them as "instrumental, important, core members" whose exits "sparked surprise internally."
Implications
The kindest interpretation is that AlphaFold simply completed its task, spun off a company, and freed its people for new endeavors. DeepMind remains proud of the work. However, the shift signals a broader change as the lab defined by deep science shifts focus to the same language model race as others. Worse, it’s losing key talent to rivals.
Whether betting on an "AI scientist" pays off like AlphaFold did is uncertain.
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Ana Maria Constantin
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