Google DeepMind loses Nobel laureate John Jumper to Anthropic, its third senior researcher to depart in as many months
John Jumper, the Vice President at Google DeepMind who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with chief executive Demis Hassabis for building AlphaFold, announced
John Jumper, the Vice President at Google DeepMind who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with chief executive Demis Hassabis for building AlphaFold, announced on Friday that he is leaving the company to join Anthropic after nine years, becoming the third senior DeepMind researcher to depart in as many months and revealing that his final stretch at Google had been spent on AI coding tools rather than the scientific work that won him a Nobel. Nine years on: an unlikely exit for John Jumper John Jumper confirmed the move in a post on X, framing it as the end of a long chapter rather than a clean break. “After nearly 9 years, I have decided to leave Google DeepMind and join Anthropic (after taking some time to recharge). I am incredibly grateful for my time at GDM. Demis Hassabis took a real chance letting me lead the AlphaFold team just six months after finishing my PhD, and the entire GDM team taught me so much about how to do great science. GDM is a special place, and I'll still be excited to hear about what amazing things they discover next.” John Jumper was handed the AlphaFold team barely half a year after completing his doctorate, and went on to lead the system that can predict a protein's three-dimensional structure directly from its amino acid sequence, a tool now credited with more than 200 million protein structure predictions that have cut months, and sometimes years, off biological research.
Science to software: a quiet shift Before his departure, John Jumper had moved away from frontier science work and onto Google's AI coding development team, according to a Bloomberg report, at a time when Google has been trying to close the gap with Anthropic, OpenAI and other rivals in selling AI coding tools to businesses. The shift places a Nobel laureate's final Google posting some distance from the protein research that made his name, and underlines how thinly stretched Google's research priorities have become as the company fights on multiple fronts at once. Farewell note: gratitude, not grievance Hassabis responded publicly, crediting AlphaFold with reshaping expectations of what AI could do for science. "What we achieved with AlphaFold changed the world, and showed the field what was possible with AI for science and medicine, lighting the way for how AI can benefit humanity," he wrote, a tribute that echoed the warmth of Jumper's own post rather than any sense of acrimony. Three exits, one quarter: talent drain Jumper's move is the third high-profile departure from Google DeepMind in a matter of months. Days earlier, Noam Shazeer, co-lead of Google's Gemini model and a co-author of the 2017 paper that introduced the transformer architecture underpinning most modern AI systems, announced he was leaving for OpenAI, less than two years after Google paid a reported $2.7 billion to bring him back from Character.AI. "I'm excited to share that I'll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there," Shazeer wrote, adding that "it was a difficult decision to move on" and that he was “incredibly proud of the amazing team at Google.” Also Read | In India visit, Google DeepMind chief pitches key role in public AI utilities Before that, David Silver, the lead researcher behind AlphaGo, AlphaZero and MuZero, left DeepMind to found his own venture, Ineffable Intelligence, which is pursuing reinforcement learning approaches to superintelligence rather than large language models.
The BriefWire