AlphaFold Won the Nobel. The Team Is Gone. AI Runs the Labs Now.

Harvard physics professor Strominger brought a problem to test ChatGPT. He wasn't looking for help. His former student had left academia for OpenAI, and Strominger was skeptical. This was a stress test. The problem involved gluon scattering amplitudes. For decades, physicists had assumed a particular quantity was simply zero. No one had ever questioned it. No one had calculated it either. The AI ran for 12 hours. The answer wasn't zero. Four physicists spent a week checking the math by hand. They confirmed it. The paper is now published: the first theoretical physics discovery completed by AI. That same month, the Financial Times ran an investigation: Google DeepMind had disbanded the core research team behind AlphaFold. AlphaFold solved a longstanding biological problem: predicting how proteins fold into three-dimensional shapes. That shape determines how a protein functions in the body. Getting it right changes how fast new drugs can be developed. In autumn 2024, the work won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. When Demis Hassabis and John Jumper received the call from Stockholm, only two years had passed since their final AlphaFold paper. The prize was awarded. The team dispersed. Jumper moved to Anthropic. Others transferred to Gemini and commercial projects. Google DeepMind's direction shifted: away from models tailored to specific scientific problems, toward general-purpose AI that helps scientists design and run experiments. In July, the US federal government announced a major expansion of its Genesis Initiative, committing over five billion dollars to build a network of AI-automated laboratories at universities across the country. Scientists design experiments remotely. AI runs them. The system analyzes results and proposes the next hypothesis. Twenty research teams were selected, covering protein engineering, quantum materials, and biomimetic materials, each receiving roughly twenty million dollars to get started. Strominger said afterward that the experience left him energized. Like collaborating with an exceptionally creative human, he said. The Genesis Initiative laboratories are designed to run twenty-four hours a day.