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Google Researchers Shazeer and Jumper to Join OpenAI and Anthropic
Insider reported that Noam Shazeer and John Jumper announced departures from Google this week to join OpenAI and Anthropic. The moves follow Andrej Karpathy's earlier decision to join Anthropic and coincided with a 5% drop in Google's share price. Google paid $2.7 billion last year to rehire Shazeer after he founded Character.AI.
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Noam Shazeer, a vice president of engineering working on Gemini at Google, announced on Wednesday that he is leaving to join OpenAI, Insider reported. Shazeer is a co-inventor of the Transformers architecture that underlies most large language models. Two days later, John Jumper announced he is leaving Google DeepMind to join Anthropic, Insider reported.
Jumper's work on AlphaFold contributed to a Nobel Prize shared with Demis Hassabis. He has one year of garden leave before starting at Anthropic, a source familiar told Insider. The announcements follow a move a month earlier by Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI cofounder, who said he would join Anthropic's pretraining team, Insider reported.
Together the departures come as Anthropic and OpenAI have pulled ahead of rivals including Google in coding. Google's share price fell by as much as about 7% on Monday before closing down 5%, Insider reported. The first trading day after both Shazeer and Jumper had announced their departures.
In 2024 Google paid $2.7 billion to license Character.AI's technology and hire Shazeer back after he had left to launch the startup, Insider reported. Google holds a stake in Anthropic. A Google spokesperson told Insider that AI talent is a competitive space and that the company remains confident in its ability to attract and retain people, including from rival labs.
The spokesperson said its talent pool includes top-level PhDs, researchers, and engineers, and so its overall trajectory would not be affected by a handful of departures.
