John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, announced on Friday that he is leaving Google DeepMind to join AI company Anthropic after nearly nine years at the firm.
Jumper made the announcement in a post on X, writing warmly of his time at DeepMind. “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,” he wrote. He added that DeepMind “is a special place,” and said he would remain eager to follow the company’s future discoveries.
Jumper and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024 for their work on AlphaFold, an AI model capable of predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins based on their genetic sequences. According to Bloomberg, Jumper had also been a key member of Google’s team developing coding tools — an area the company has struggled to sell to businesses.
Jumper’s departure is not an isolated event. Character AI co-founder Noam Shazeer also announced this week that he is leaving DeepMind, though Shazeer is heading to OpenAI rather than Anthropic.
The back-to-back exits of two prominent figures from Google DeepMind in the same week may suggest growing competition among AI firms for top research talent, though the source does not specify the reasons behind either departure beyond Jumper’s public statement about his time at the company.
Source: TechCrunch