At Google I/O, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis signaled a strategic shift in AI-driven science: from specialized tools like AlphaFold and WeatherNext toward agentic, LLM-based systems capable of conducting research autonomously. While specialized tools remain widely used — AlphaFold has served over 3 million researchers — signs of realignment are emerging, including Nobel laureate John Jumper moving to AI coding work. Google's new Gemini for Science package bundles LLM-based scientific agents like AI Co-Scientist and AlphaEvolve under one brand. Meanwhile, OpenAI demonstrated that a general-purpose reasoning model disproved a mathematics conjecture, suggesting general agents may soon contribute meaningfully to scientific research without domain-specific training. Google is carefully framing these agents as human collaborators rather than replacements, but the trajectory points toward increasingly autonomous AI scientists.
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