The End of AlphaFold and Rise of Gemini: Paradigm Shift from Scientific Discovery to Commercial Monetization

The disbanding of the AlphaFold team wasn't accidental. This decision directly reveals DeepMind's fundamental strategic shift: from an academic-style lab focused on basic scientific discovery to a commercially driven organization centered on productized AI capabilities. The two directions—AlphaFold (protein structure prediction) and Gemini (multimodal large language model)—differ essentially in resource allocation, research paradigms, evaluation metrics, and commercialization paths.