The co-creator of AlphaFold and a 2024 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry just left Google DeepMind after 9 years to join Anthropic.
John Jumper led the team that solved protein structure prediction, a problem that had been open for 50 years. AlphaFold has mapped over 200 million protein structures and changed how biological and medical research works.
Days ago, Noam Shazeer, co-author of the Transformer paper and co-lead of Gemini, left Google for OpenAI. Google lost a Nobel laureate to Anthropic and the architect of the Transformer to OpenAI in the same week.
Google has more money, compute, and data than any AI lab in existence. Why do its best researchers keep choosing smaller teams?
John Jumper (@JohnJumperSci)
A bit of news: After nearly 9 years, I have decided to leave Google DeepMind and join Anthropic (after taking some time to recharge). I am incredibly grateful for my time at GDM. @demishassabis 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. GDM is a special place, and I’ll still be excited to hear about what amazing things they discover next.
— https://nitter.net/JohnJumperSci/status/2068001285173834106#m