In a week, Google lost two senior members to rival organisations.
John Jumper, co-creator of AlphaFold and 2024 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, announced his departure from Google DeepMind on June 19, to join Anthropic.
This announcement follows a day after Noam Shazeer decided to make a switch from Google to IPO-bound OpenAI. He is the vice president of engineering at Google and co-lead of its Gemini AI models.
The tech world is seeing these announcements as a big blow to Gemini and Deepmind model’s AI-ambitions. However, Shazeer’s shift may not actually work against the search engine firm, but instead in its favour. Google holds roughly 14% of Anthropic in straight equity, hard-capped contractually at 15%. At Anthropic’s current $965 billion valuation, that stake is worth roughly $135 billion. At a $1 trillion dollar IPO that could be worth $140 billion, reports the Fortune.
However, even as Anthropic is currently embroiled in a high-stakes legal and regulatory battle with the U.S. government, it has not stopped dreaming. Jumper is Anthropic’s second big hire in a month. The parent company of Claude also hired Andrej Karpathy, often called the ‘GOAT’ in his field, marking one of the most important talent shifts in artificial intelligence this year.
OpenAI, too, has been hiring top leadership. It hired Trump White House AI policy official Dean Ball to shore up its policy credentials, reported Tech Crunch. Ball is known for this brief White House stint last year, where he helped publish America’s AI Action Plan before stepping down to rejoin the Foundation for American Innovation as a senior fellow.
But as agentic capabilities develop, a talent war is taking place among leading firms such as Meta, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and so on. The race to build next-generation AI systems is driving this shuffle where major contributors are looking to make the switch. Whether a single decorated individual’s exit can dismantle the deepest bench of AI talent is yet to be known.
