According to Bloomberg, top AI researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzell are leaving Google and joining Anthropic. According to the report, Adler and Pretzel played key roles in the development of Google’s Gemini model.
TechCrunch has reached out to Google for comment.
These departures are part of a worrying trend for Google. Last week, legendary AI researcher Noam Shazeer announced he was leaving Google for a job at OpenAI. Shazeer has been with Google since 2000, save for the three years he spent building the controversial chatbot startup Character.AI (which Google effectively acquired for $2.7 billion, in part to bring Shazeer back to Gemini).
A few days after Shazeer’s announcement, John Jumper, director of Google DeepMind, announced that he was leaving Google to join Anthropic. Jumper won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis for his work on AlphaFold, which can predict the 3D structure of proteins from amino acid sequences.
This trend could continue as OpenAI and Anthropic prepare to go public. Now is the perfect time for companies to commit equity and hire top AI talent.
