Google Deepmind is losing another high-profile researcher to a rival. Nobel Prize winner and AlphaFold team lead John Jumper jumped ship to Anthropic after nearly nine years. Jumper shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis for developing AlphaFold, an AI system that transformed protein structure prediction. Hassabis thanked Jumper for their "extraordinary partnership" and said AlphaFold had "changed the world."
The timing makes it worse. Shortly before, Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer left for OpenAI, one of the minds behind the reasoning approach powering Google's latest models. Within weeks, Anthropic and OpenAI poached two of Google's most important researchers. And before that, Deepmind lost David Silver, a lead researcher behind AlphaGo and AlphaZero, who left to start his own startup focused on world models and reinforcement learning.
Meanwhile, Gemini 3.5 Pro is reportedly set to launch in late June, but insider rumors suggest it won't be competitive with the latest models from Anthropic and OpenAI.
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