Nobel Laureate Follows Trend: Key AI Talent Leaves Google for Anthropic

Following the departure of a co-developer of Gemini, a Nobel Prize-winning vice president at DeepMind is now leaving Google to join another artificial intelligence (AI) company.
Bloomberg reported on June 19 (local time) that John Jumper, a vice president at Google DeepMind who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, is leaving the company to join Anthropic.
Jumper is a central figure in Google's AI coding development team and a key player who, alongside DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, developed "AlphaFold," an AI model that predicts protein structures.
Through X (formerly Twitter), Jumper expressed his gratitude, stating, "I have decided to leave Google DeepMind after about nine years and will be joining Anthropic," adding, "Demis Hassabis gave me the opportunity to lead the AlphaFold team just six months after I received my PhD."
This marks another loss of key personnel for Google, coming less than a week after Noam Shazeer, a co-developer of Gemini and author of the paper that sparked research into the foundations of generative AI, announced his move to OpenAI.
Anthropic and OpenAI, where these individuals have moved, are currently the two leading companies in the AI model industry.
OpenAI was founded as a non-profit in 2015 before creating a for-profit entity, OpenAI LP, in 2019. Anthropic is a startup founded in 2021, but in a short period, the two companies have come to dominate the market with ChatGPT and Claude, respectively.
According to Bloomberg, DeepMind employees have reportedly been concerned in recent months that the company lacks a clear solution to address the demand for AI coding tools.
(Photo: Yonhap News)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.