DeepMind CEO says Google retains top AI talent after two exits

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said the company continues to attract and retain top AI talent even after two senior researchers left. He spoke during an on-stage interview at the Cannes Lions Festival. Hassabis stated that Google maintains the largest research bench among AI labs and wins its share of leading talent.

A Google spokesperson said the small number of departures will not affect the company’s overall direction.

Market reaction and context Google shares fell as much as 7 percent on Monday after the exits of Noam Shazeer and John Jumper. The moves raised investor questions about retention in a competitive AI hiring market. Hassabis described the current environment as the most ferociously competitive job market the tech industry has seen. He noted that talent movement occurs across all leading labs.

Researcher contributions Shazeer co-authored the 2017 paper “Attention is All You Need,” which introduced the transformer architecture used in many current large language models. Jumper contributed to AlphaFold, the system that predicted protein structures and earned Hassabis and Jumper Nobel Prizes.

Hassabis pointed to Google’s data resources, custom Tensor Processing Units, and unified research structure after the 2023 merger of Google Brain and DeepMind as advantages for retaining researchers.