More AI researchers leave Google for rivals Anthropic and OpenAI

In short: Several well-known AI researchers are leaving Google for competitors like Anthropic and OpenAI.

What's going on

Bloomberg reports that two senior AI researchers, Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, are leaving Google to join Anthropic. The report says they played important roles in building Gemini, which is Google’s main AI model (a large computer program trained on lots of text to answer questions and create content).

TechCrunch said it reached out to Google for comment. The moves add to a recent pattern of high-profile departures from Google’s AI teams.

Last week, AI researcher Noam Shazeer said he was leaving Google for OpenAI. Shazeer has been connected to Google for decades, with a break to build Character.AI, a chatbot start-up. TechCrunch noted that Google later brought parts of that company and team in, partly to bring Shazeer back to work on Gemini.

A few days after Shazeer’s announcement, John Jumper, a director at Google DeepMind, also said he was leaving Google for Anthropic. Jumper and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on AlphaFold, a system that predicts how proteins fold into 3D shapes (like guessing how a long string will twist into a specific knot).

What to watch

TechCrunch points out that Anthropic and OpenAI are preparing to go public, meaning they may sell shares on the stock market. That process can make it easier to offer stock to new hires, which can be a strong reason to switch jobs. If more top researchers keep moving, it could affect how quickly Google improves Gemini and how fast rivals release competing AI tools.

Source: TechCrunch AI