Google DeepMind loses Nobel-winning VP in latest high-profile exit
What's the story
John Jumper, Vice President of Google DeepMind and a 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner, has announced his departure from the company. He will be joining Anthropic after nearly 9 years at Google DeepMind. This is the third high-profile exit from DeepMind in as many months. Jumper's last project at Google was on AI coding tools, not the scientific work that won him a Nobel Prize.
Career shift
Jumper confirms move to Anthropic in post on X
Jumper confirmed his move to Anthropic in a post on X, saying he was looking forward to the next chapter of his career. He thanked Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, for trusting him with the AlphaFold team. "GDM is a special place," Jumper wrote, adding that he would be excited to see what amazing things they discover next.
Scientific contribution
Jumper's journey at Google DeepMind
Jumper was handed the AlphaFold team just six months after completing his PhD. He went on to lead the system that predicts a protein's three-dimensional structure from its amino acid sequence. The tool has now made over 200 million protein structure predictions, saving months and sometimes years of biological research. Before leaving, he had transitioned from frontier science work to Google's AI coding development team amid rising competition in the field.
Acknowledgment
'What we achieved with AlphaFold changed the world': Hassabis
Hassabis publicly acknowledged Jumper's contributions to AlphaFold, saying it reshaped expectations of what AI could do for science. "What we achieved with AlphaFold changed the world, and showed the field what was possible with AI for science and medicine," he wrote. This acknowledgment comes as Jumper's move marks another high-profile departure from Google DeepMind in a few months.
Departures
Other notable exits from Google DeepMind
Along with Jumper, other notable exits from Google DeepMind include Noam Shazeer and David Silver. Shazeer, co-lead of the Gemini model and a co-author of the 2017 paper that introduced the transformer architecture for AI systems, announced his departure for OpenAI. Silver, lead researcher behind AlphaGo and MuZero, left DeepMind to start his own venture, Ineffable Intelligence.
Future prospects
Jumper's role at Anthropic remains undisclosed
Jumper has not revealed his role at Anthropic but said he will take some time off first. The moves come as Anthropic and OpenAI prepare for potential public listings, ramping up competition among Silicon Valley's top AI labs for a limited pool of researchers. This comes just days after Hassabis warned humanity has little time left to prepare for artificial general intelligence (AGI).