Google Shuts Down AlphaFold Winners of Nobel Prize, Focuses on Gemini

Google Deepmind has terminated the AlphaFold project, an AI program capable of predicting protein structures in just a few minutes, effectively solving the 50 year old problem and winning the Nobel prize in 2024. Nobel prize winner John Jumper has moved to Anthropic, with the rest of the team being reassigned to Gemini teams or spun off into Isomorphic Labs. The database of 200 million predicted protein structures will still be available, but no further work is being done on it.

Google gave up on its most important scientific endeavor ever in order to compete in the chatbot arms race. AlphaFold was able to do in minutes what took biologists years, speeding up the discovery of cures for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and various other infectious diseases. It’s the first time a large AI company has shut down a Nobel prize winning project in favor of pursuing a profitable business model.