Google Loses Two AI Leaders: Transformer Co-author Shazeer Joins OpenAI, AlphaFold Founder Jumper Moves to Anthropic

Noam Shazeer, co-author of the Transformer architecture, announced on June 18 his departure from Google to join OpenAI, while AlphaFold's creator John Jumper also revealed his move to competitor Anthropic after nearly nine years at Google DeepMind. Jumper, a 2024 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, will join Anthropic as the company invests significantly in life sciences. Shazeer, who had been working on Google's Gemini project since returning to the company in 2024 under a 2.7 billion dollar agreement, cited organizational friction and slower decision-making at large enterprises as factors in his departure.

The talent exodus coincides with mounting pressure on Google's AI models. According to Artificial Analysis, Anthropic's latest models now top benchmarks, while Google's Gemini has fallen to the second tier, even surpassed by China's open-source GLM-5.2. Gemini 3.5 Pro, announced in May, remains in limited preview as of mid-June.