Google DeepMind dismantles Nobel-winning AlphaFold team, loses top talent in major shift toward Gemini and AI Agents. Will it remain research-first lab?

FT reported that GDM dismantled AlphaFold team in strategy shift. Key points from the FT article: Most researchers were reassigned to internal projects like Gemini, AI coding, genomics, enzyme design, nuclear fusion, or moved to Isomorphic Labs. John Jumper (Nobel laureate), Jonas Adler, and Alexander Pritzel have all left for Anthropic. Prior to leaving, Jumper and Adler moved to Code Strike team, team assemled to improve company's coding capabilities. Nearly 25% of the original AlphaFold authors have left DeepMind entirely. GDM says its strategy has evolved from solving individual scientific problems to building Gemini-powered AI that can accelerate scientific discovery. The shift reflects the industry's focus on frontier LLMs and AI agents, where Google is competing with OpenAI and Anthropic. AlphaFold, once GDM's flagship long-term research project, no longer has a dedicated team. Do you still see GDM primarily as a research lab, or has it become another frontier AI product company with science as one application? Source: FT article ("Google DeepMind dismantles Nobel-winning AlphaFold team in strategy shift", July 29), since the article is behind paywall it appears to break rule #2 co won't link it here