The award-winning team behind Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold program is no more. Google has reassigned most of the project’s key contributors and original authors to other roles, while some have left the company altogether.
The award-winning team behind Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold program is no more. Google has reassigned most of the project’s key contributors and original authors to other roles, while some have left the company altogether.
AlphaFold is an artificial intelligence program that can accurately predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their amino acid sequence in minutes instead of years. It is currently being used to accelerate drug development, create vaccines, and study structural changes in proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, Engadget reports .
DeepMind began developing AlphaFold in 2018. In 2020, the system was recognized as the solution to a 50-year-old problem of humanity - the "protein folding problem", which was supposed to answer the question of how amino acids automatically fold into complex 3D shapes. These shapes actually determine the biological role of a protein. Over the previous half century, scientists were able to determine the structures of about 170,000 proteins using tools and techniques such as X-ray diffraction and nuclear magnetic resonance. The AlphaFold team took data from these previous studies and loaded them into their AI to train the model.
In 2021, Nature published papers describing the AlphaFold methodology and predicting the structures of the entire human proteome—the complete set of proteins produced by our species. DeepMind then launched the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, giving researchers free access to over 200 million protein structure models. In 2024, DeepMind CEO Demis Gassabis and John Jumper (who was a staff scientist at the beginning of the project and later became vice president and chief engineer) won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold .
In June, Jumper announced that he was leaving DeepMind for Anthropic. Several of his colleagues have also changed companies and joined Anthropic. DeepMind confirmed that some employees have also been transferred internally to projects related to Gemini. Other former team members have been reassigned to Isomorphic Labs, an Alphabet-owned drug development company that is a spinoff of DeepMind.
This decision clearly shows that Google is directing more and more of its resources towards the development of Gemini.
“For the past nine years, our strategy has been to focus on grand challenges… a specific goal that each project is focused on,” said Pushmit Kohli, vice president of research at Google DeepMind. “Now that strategy has evolved.”
