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Google Shuts Down Its Nobel-Prize Winning AlphaFold Project

Google has dismantled the original AlphaFold team, according to Financial Times (paywalled), reassigning many researchers to Gemini and Isomorphic Labs. Several other key members, including Nobel laureate John Jumper, left for Anthropic. Engadget reports: AlphaFold is an AI program that can accurately predict three-dimensional structures of proteins from their amino acid sequences in minutes instead of years. It's now being used to accelerate drug discovery, develop vaccines and understand the structural changes in proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. DeepMind started developing AlphaFold in 2018. In 2020, it was recognized as a solution to humanity's 50-year-old "protein folding problem," which sought to answer how amino acids automatically fold into complex 3D shapes. Those shapes determine the biological role of a protein. Scientists had identified the structures of roughly 170,000 proteins over the past 50 years, using tools and techniques like X-ray and nuclear magnetic resonance. The AlphaFold team took information from those previous work and then fed it to their AI to train AlphaFold. In 2021, Nature published the papers with AlphaFold's methodology and the structure predictions of the entire human proteome, or the complete set of proteins expressed by our species. DeepMind then launched the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, giving researchers free access to over 200 million protein structure predictions. In 2024, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who was a staff research scientist when the project began and who eventually became a VP and engineering fellow, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold.

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Quatre modèles en deux mois : Anthropic lance Claude Opus 5 et coûte moins que GPT-5.6 Sol

Après Sonnet 5 et l'emballement autour de Fable 5 et Mythos 5, Anthropic dévoile Claude Opus 5, son nouveau modèle haut de gamme intégré à tous ses abonnements. L'entreprise promet des performances proches de son meilleur modèle pour deux fois moins cher, avec des records dans plusieurs tests de référence.

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Top Online Sites Debate Cutting Off Google's Crawlers

Futurism reports: [Some online publications] are now debating whether to cut Google off entirely, as the Wall Street Journal reports, illustrating an increasingly fraught relationship between the tech giant and the publishers that are creating content its AI models are regurgitating. According to the newspaper, prominent outlets including USA Today, Politico, the Economist, People, and Reuters are all reexamining their relationship with Google. Some are debating whether to continue to work with the tech giant at all... Even Reddit executives are reevaluating the company's $60 million-a-year contract that allows Google to train its AI models on user-submitted content on the platform. They've similarly watched as Google's AI features discourage users from navigating to Reddit... Beyond pondering whether to cut Google off, other publishers have resorted to suing the company, accusing it of illegally rehashing their intellectual property via AI summaries. It's an extremely undesirable position for publishers. By severing ties with the search giant, they could face even steeper declines in traffic. At the same time, there's seemingly little to gain from having Google's AIs crawl their content — and in the long term, it could guarantee their destruction. Two interesting data points from the article: "Last month, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince noticed that automated bot traffic had overtaken human traffic for the first time in the internet's history." "USA Today has seen its traffic from US users drop by almost half over the last year."

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Après deux ans de blocage, Google lance les Résumés IA en France (AI Overviews)

Google déploie les Résumés IA (AI Overviews) et le mode conversationnel (AI Mode) en France, deux ans après leur lancement aux États-Unis. Le moteur de recherche répond désormais directement aux requêtes et ne se contente plus d'afficher des liens vers des sites externes. Une bascule redoutée par les sites.

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Le plus gros problème des clims mobiles, pari fou d’Elon Musk, bracelet Google Fitbit Air – le récap’ tech de la semaine

Que retenir de l'actualité tech de la semaine ? Un Français qui a résolu LE problème des climatiseurs mobiles ; le pari fou d'Elon Musk avec SpaceX en Bourse ; le bracelet Google Fitbit Air sauvé par l'application Bevel : ce sont les sujets que vous avez le plus lus sur Numerama.

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Le bracelet Google Fitbit Air n’était pas très utile, mais l’application Bevel change tout

À 99 euros, le Google Fitbit Air est un des produits les mieux positionnés pour suivre sa santé… mais son application n'exploite pas assez bien les données collectées. La version 3.1 de Bevel change la donne : l'app peut désormais se connecter directement à Google Health et transforme le bracelet en alternative crédible à Whoop.

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Google Images Gets a Pinterest-Like Redesign Focused On Discovery

Google Images is getting a Pinterest-like redesign that turns image search into a personalized discovery feed, with "For You" galleries, real-time updates, and collections for saving visual ideas. "Google is also adding a way for users to create AI images right in Search, as it celebrates 25 years since the debut of Google Images," reports TechCrunch. From the report: After navigating to the redesigned Google Images, users will see a "For You" gallery of images tailored to their interests and browsing history. Like Pinterest, the gallery is designed for continuous browsing, with Google saying it updates in real time with new images. As users browse, they can save ideas to their "collections," which will appear as tabs above the main gallery of photos. For example, users can create collections for things like vacation outfit ideas, travel inspiration, and ways to design a reading nook, which they can come back to later. [...] As for generating images directly in Search, Google says the feature is meant for moments when you have a highly specific idea for an image that doesn't already exist online. Google is bringing image generation directly into AI Overviews on Search and will use its latest Nano Banana model to transform a text prompt into a custom visual. The feature can also help users reimagine spaces and visualize ideas, such as seeing what a room might look like painted red or what a dorm room with a coastal theme could look like.

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