AI researchers keep leaving Google for rivals
▼ Summary
– Top AI researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel are leaving Google for Anthropic, having worked on Google’s Gemini model.
– Legendary AI researcher Noam Shazeer left Google for OpenAI after returning from his startup Character.AI.
– Google DeepMind director John Jumper, a 2024 Nobel laureate for AlphaFold, left Google for Anthropic.
– These departures indicate a concerning trend of top talent leaving Google for competitors.
– The trend may continue as OpenAI and Anthropic prepare to go public and recruit with equity promises.
Top AI researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, both instrumental in building Google’s Gemini model, are departing the tech giant for rival Anthropic, according to a Bloomberg report. TechCrunch has reached out to Google for comment on the exits.
These high-profile moves are part of a concerning brain drain at Google. Just last week, legendary AI researcher Noam Shazeer announced he was leaving for OpenAI. Shazeer had been with Google since 2000, with a brief three-year detour building his controversial chatbot startup, Character. AI. Google effectively acqui-hired that company for $2.7 billion, in part to bring Shazeer back to work on Gemini.
Days after Shazeer’s announcement, Google DeepMind director John Jumper revealed he was also heading to Anthropic. Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis for his work on AlphaFold (a system that predicts 3D protein structures from amino acid sequences), represents a massive loss for the company.
With OpenAI and Anthropic both preparing to go public, this trend may accelerate. The prospect of equity in a newly public company is a powerful recruiting tool, making this a prime moment for rivals to poach top-tier AI talent.
(Source: TechCrunch)
