A core researcher at Google DeepMind who won a Nobel Prize is leaving the company for rival Anthropic.
Bloomberg said on the 20th (local time) that John Jumper, a Google DeepMind vice president who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, will join Anthropic after leaving.
Vice President Jumper is the person who, together with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, developed the protein structure prediction AI model "AlphaFold." AlphaFold is an AI system that predicts the three-dimensional structure of proteins, is used in life sciences and new drug development research, and is cited as a representative example showing AI's scientific potential. Vice President Jumper and CEO Hassabis jointly won the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry for this achievement.
Through X, Jumper said, "I decided to leave Google DeepMind after about nine years and will join Anthropic," and noted, "Demis Hassabis gave me the opportunity to lead the AlphaFold team just six months after I earned my Ph.D."
Noam Shazeer, Google's vice president of engineering, also said on the 17th that he is leaving Google to join OpenAI. Shazeer is a key figure who took part in developing Google's AI model Gemini and is also a co-author of the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which Google released.
The paper proposed the transformer architecture, a core technology of large language models (LLMs), and is regarded as the technical foundation of today's Generative AI models. With Vice President John Jumper heading to Anthropic as well, Google has faced a situation in which key personnel in AI have moved to competitors in a matter of days.
Regarding this trend, Bloomberg reported that in recent months concerns have been raised within DeepMind that Google's response to the enterprise AI coding tools market is not sufficiently clear.
Meanwhile, Anthropic and OpenAI, which they joined, are considered the most watched corporations in the Generative AI market today. OpenAI began in 2015 as a nonprofit research organization and in 2019 established a for-profit institutional sector, accelerating commercialization, while Anthropic is an AI startup founded in 2021 by researchers from OpenAI. The two companies are competing in the high-performance AI model market with ChatGPT and Claude, respectively.