Google DeepMind loses its Gemini co-lead and a Nobel laureate in 48 hours
Noam Shazeer, VP of engineering and co-lead of Gemini, and a co-author of the 2017 Attention Is All You Need paper, said on Wednesday that he is leaving Google for IPO-bound OpenAI — less than two years after Google reportedly paid $2.7B to bring him back with his Character.AI team.
A day later John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold, announced he is leaving Google DeepMind after nearly nine years to join Anthropic. Analysts framed the pair of exits as evidence that OpenAI and Anthropic can out-recruit big tech by promising less bureaucracy and more focus on frontier work.
WHY IT MATTERS
Two named, senior departures in 48 hours is the sharpest signal yet that the talent war is a measurable competitive risk for Google, not just a recruiting annoyance — and it hands Anthropic a science-credibility hire right as it fights the Commerce Department.

