AI researchers continue to leave Google for its rivals

Top AI researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel are leaving Google for Anthropic, according to Bloomberg. Per the report, Adler and Pritzel played key roles in the development of Google’s Gemini model.

TechCrunch reached out to Google for comment.

These departures are part of a concerning trend for Google. Last week, legendary AI researcher Noam Shazeer announced that he was leaving Google for OpenAI. Shazeer had been at Google since 2000, save for the three years he spent building his controversial chatbot startup, Character.AI (which Google effectively acqui-hired for $2.7 billion, in part to bring Shazeer back to work on Gemini).

Just days after Shazeer made his announcement, Google DeepMind director John Jumper said he was leaving Google for Anthropic. Alongside DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, Jumper won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on AlphaFold, which can predict 3D protein structures from animo acid sequences.

As OpenAI and Anthropic prepare to go public, this trend could continue — it’s a great time for the companies to recruit top AI talent with a promise of equity.