Top AI Researchers Leave Google for Rivals

Top AI researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel are leaving Google for Anthropic, according to Bloomberg. Adler and Pritzel played key roles in the development of Google's Gemini model. TechCrunch reached out to Google for comment.

These departures are part of a concerning trend for Google. Last week, legendary AI researcher Noam Shazeer announced that he was leaving Google for OpenAI. Shazeer had been at Google since 2000, save for the three years he spent building his controversial chatbot startup, Character.AI, which Google effectively acqui-hired for $2.7 billion, in part to bring Shazeer back to work on Gemini.

Just days after Shazeer made his announcement, Google DeepMind director John Jumper said he was leaving Google for Anthropic. Alongside DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, Jumper won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on AlphaFold, which can predict 3D protein structures from amino acid sequences. As OpenAI and Anthropic prepare to go public, this trend could continue — it's a great time for the companies to recruit top AI talent with a promise of equity.

The exodus of top AI researchers from Google to rival companies like Anthropic and OpenAI has significant implications for the AI industry. As these companies prepare to go public, they are likely to attract even more top talent with promises of equity. This could lead to a brain drain at Google, which has long been a leader in AI research.

For developers and businesses, this shift could mean a change in the types of AI models and tools that are being developed. Consumers may ultimately benefit from the innovations that come out of these rival companies, but the loss of talent at Google raises questions about the company's ability to stay competitive in the rapidly evolving AI field. As the industry continues to evolve, it will be important to watch how these companies adapt to the changing talent landscape and how their research priorities shift as a result.