Departures One After Another
TechCrunch reported on June 24 that Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, who carried major weight in Gemini's development, have left Google for Anthropic. About a week earlier, Noam Shazeer left too—for OpenAI. He's one of the authors of the Transformer paper, joined Google as early as 2000, went out to run Character.AI for three years in between, and was later brought back by Google via an "acquihire" of about $2.7 billion to work on Gemini. Together with Nobel laureate John Jumper, who moved from DeepMind to Anthropic on June 20, Google has lost several core people in a short span.
Why Everyone Leaves at This Moment
The report matches the reason to the timing: OpenAI and Anthropic both secretly filed IPO paperwork in early June, and having equity and options to offer is exactly the bargaining chip for poaching top researchers. Google did not respond to requests for comment.
Don't Rush to Conclusions
Where people go does reveal a lab's direction better than a single benchmark. But don't over-read individual job changes either—Google's talent depth is still there, and what matters is whether the departures reach a scale and cluster in the same direction. What these people ultimately build at their new employers is more worth waiting for than "who got poached again."
via: TechCrunch