Google's Nobel Laureate Bolted to Anthropic and Took $250 Billion of Alphabet With Him

Nobel laureate John Jumper, the AlphaFold lead, walked out of Google DeepMind for Anthropic, and Transformer co-author Noam Shazeer left for OpenAI, the same Shazeer Google paid roughly $2.7 billion to drag back two years ago. Two of Google’s most prominent researchers leaving for direct competitors wiped roughly $250 billion from the company’s market capitalization in its worst single-day slide in more than a year. Anthropic and OpenAI are both seen as IPO candidates, and for elite researchers, moving from a $4 trillion public company to a pre-IPO startup is one of the clearest paths to outsized financial gain. The people who built the moat decided the moat was worth less than a lottery ticket, and the market agreed. D.A. Davidson’s Gil Luria warned that “Google is losing the war for talent at the frontier of AI,” adding the departures suggest Google may now be falling visibly behind. Bloomberg on the Anthropic defections