via TechCrunch AI
Google Loses More Top AI Researchers to Rivals Anthropic and OpenAI
Two more high-profile AI researchers, Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, are leaving Google for Anthropic, according to a Bloomberg report. Adler and Pritzel were instrumental in the development of Google’s Gemini model. Their departures add to a growing trend of top AI talent leaving Google for rival companies.
Last week, legendary AI researcher Noam Shazeer announced he was leaving Google for OpenAI. Shazeer had been at Google since 2000, except for a three-year stint building his controversial chatbot startup, Character.AI, which Google effectively acqui-hired for $2.7 billion in part to bring him back to work on Gemini.
Just days after Shazeer’s announcement, John Jumper, a director at Google DeepMind, revealed he was leaving for Anthropic. Jumper shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis for his work on AlphaFold, which predicts 3D protein structures from amino acid sequences.
As OpenAI and Anthropic prepare for initial public offerings in 2026, the talent exodus from Google may accelerate. Both companies are aggressively recruiting top AI researchers by offering equity stakes, making this a prime time for them to poach talent. TechCrunch reached out to Google for comment but did not receive an immediate response.