On this quiet Friday, the AI world was rattled by news of Nobel laureate John Jumper’s defection from Google DeepMind to Anthropic.
This comes a day after the departure of Noam Shazeer from Google Gemini to OpenAI. Shazeer was one of the co-authors of the seminal transformer paper, “Attention Is All You Need,” when he worked for Google. He was the co-lead behind Gemini. Google had reportedly paid Shazeer $2.7 billion to come back to Google after he co-founded Character.AI, which later became the source of a number of lawsuits for its alleged role in wrongful deaths of minors.
David Silver also left DeepMind back in February to start a new company.