Google DeepMind It has reportedly disbanded the team behind the Nobel Prize-winning Alpha Fold AI system.
That’s according to A a report Wednesday (July 29) from the Financial Times (FT), which frames the move as Google overhauls the search strategy that has made DeepMind one of its top AI labs.
Most of the original authors of the AlphaFold research were reassigned last year, the report said, citing a Financial Times analysis of recent job moves and sources familiar with the matter.
The newspaper added that the company confirmed that employees have moved to projects that deal with Google’s Gemini language model, in addition to areas such as enzyme design, nuclear fusion, and genomics.
Others moved to Google Identical laboratories. Nearly a quarter of Google DeepMind’s full-time authors on the original AlphaFold papers have simply left the company. The Financial Times says this represents a major shift in DeepMind’s scientific strategy following the advent of artificial intelligence (AI). Large linguistic models.
“Our strategy over the past nine years has been to focus on major challenges… which is a concrete goal that every project focuses on,” he said. Pushmeet KohliVice President of Research at Google DeepMind, and founder/leader of the AI for Science team. “The strategy has evolved.”
Rather than focusing on single scientific problems, Kohli told the Financial Times, DeepMind is now also focused on developing Gemini-powered systems that can help scientists — and one day automate parts of the scientific process — while competing with companies like OpenAI and Anthropic To build frontier AI agents.
This news comes weeks after John Jumper, one of the Nobel Prize-winning scientists behind AlphaFold, made the announcement Leaving the company To join the anthropic.
In other Google AI news, PYMNTS wrote this week about new research at the company showing that workers mostly… Physical and manual rolessuch as automotive technicians and industrial mechanics, use conversational AI for real-time diagnosis, troubleshooting, and learning on the job.
The company’s research also found this Artificial intelligence in the workplace It now touches 68% of jobs, representing 90% of employment in the United States. However, in any one job, employees use it for about 21% of their tasks on average.
“Blue-collar workers tend to use a lot of what we call multimodal AI, which is AI with images and video.” Scott StrandHead of Strategic Operations and Projects for Technology and Society at Google, He said Axios last week.
