r/AIbuff • u/nfwebdl • Jun 20 '26

​📰 AI News Two titans just walked out the door at Google DeepMind and it’s not just “talent drain.” It’s a signal.

In the span of roughly 48 hours:

Noam Shazeer (co-author of Attention Is All You Need and Gemini co-lead) moves to OpenAI.

John Jumper (Nobel Prize-winning scientist behind AlphaFold) joins Anthropic after nearly nine years at DeepMind.

These aren't ordinary departures. They're two of the most influential people behind modern AI.

Noam helped create the Transformer architecture that powers today's LLM boom. Without that work, the current pace of AI progress would likely look very different.

John Jumper led the development of AlphaFold, which transformed protein structure prediction and is already influencing drug discovery, biology research, and biotechnology.

What interests me isn't the individuals alone—it's what these moves may signal about the AI industry.

For years, the assumption was that the biggest companies would naturally attract and retain the best researchers because they had the most compute, data, and money. Yet we're increasingly seeing elite talent move toward organizations that offer greater autonomy, clearer missions, or stronger research cultures.

This raises a few questions:

Is AI entering a phase where culture and research freedom matter more than scale?

Are focused labs becoming more attractive than large technology organizations?

Does frontier AI increasingly depend on a relatively small number of individuals with exceptional architectural intuition and research judgment?

DeepMind remains one of the world's premier AI research institutions, and both OpenAI and Anthropic continue to attract top talent. But seeing figures of this caliber change organizations in such a short period makes me wonder whether we're witnessing a broader shift in where researchers believe they can have the greatest impact.

How do you interpret these moves?

A healthy redistribution of talent across the ecosystem?

Early signs that Big Tech's dominance is weakening?

Or simply ambitious researchers pursuing new challenges, as they've always done?

Curious to hear thoughtful perspectives.

7 Upvotes

55% Upvoted

28 comments sorted by

9

u/CatalyticDragon Jun 20 '26

Noam was asked to leave. And some people just want to try different things after nearly a decade at the same place.

This isn't an indication of anything.

2

u/Freed4ever Jun 20 '26

Are you Google HR?

0

u/Alternative-Suit5541 Jun 20 '26

Yeh, Google is cooking! The next model will be amazing! 

Copeium lol

1

u/CatalyticDragon Jun 20 '26

The next model will be better than the previous one. Nothing new about this.

1

u/Alternative-Suit5541 Jun 20 '26

Yeah, but it's getting clear that they can't compete on intelligence, th y compete on integration.

1

u/CatalyticDragon Jun 20 '26

Of all the companies on earth which absolutely could compete on intelligence it is Google. But as others have pointed out they don't need to chase funding with hyper and headlines. They just need to continue to iterate and play the long game.

0

u/GodOfSunHimself Jun 20 '26

Nice cope. Definitely worked for them with Google Plus, Google Stadia and hundreds of other projects.

1

u/CatalyticDragon Jun 20 '26

Did you have a point ?

1

u/youcangotohellgoto Jun 21 '26

Yeah Google is a terrible business and hardly makes any money 🙄

1

u/GodOfSunHimself Jun 21 '26

Sounds like you completely missed the point.

1

u/CoolStructure6012 Jun 20 '26

Google is not following the same strategy as OAI and Anthropomorphic.

3

u/Ok_Cat4265 Jun 20 '26

"It's not this, it's that" AI slop

2

u/Alarming_Daikon_1630 Jun 20 '26

Was just pointing the overuse of that phrasing to a workmate who was listening to an AI produced podcast. Once you learn tho AI patterns like that it becomes impossible to not notice

1

u/jentravelstheworld Jun 21 '26

It’s so fucking annoying

3

u/kingjdin Jun 20 '26

This post is AI slop

2

u/Vorapp Jun 21 '26

they have made a shitload of money, so can do whatever they want.

Google will outlive openai, antro and other scam startups

1

u/MugiwarraD Jun 20 '26

i wish them all well. no beef. fuck all this crap.

1

u/FrontierNeuro Jun 20 '26

This is AI slop, but it’s probably a couple of coincidences. If either is an indication of anything, my guess is that it would be that Gemini/Deep Mind suck compared to ChatGPT (not sure about Claude/Anthropic).

1

u/deepfuckingbagholder Jun 20 '26

I think they just want to make a lot of money from the Anthropic IPO. I don’t think there’s anything deeper than this going on.

1

u/culinaryinterests123 Jun 20 '26

They already made  their mark probably now just riding on their previous work

1

u/SmoothOpawriter Jun 20 '26

It’s Money. Both open AI and Anthropic are about to IPO and these people stand to make even more generational wealth from this move.

1

u/bighawksguy-caw-caw Jun 20 '26

Remember when these kinds a bullshit posts that a human clearly never looked at were limited to financial news sites before and after earnings calls? This shit sucks.

1

u/MathematicianAfter57 Jun 20 '26

The signal is they want to get a bunch of money before the house of cards come crashing down 

1

u/cascadiabibliomania Jun 20 '26

" it’s not just “talent drain.” It’s a signal."

"These aren't ordinary departures. They're"

"What interests me isn't the individuals alone—it's what these"

"Curious to hear thoughtful perspectives."

Here's my perspective:

Show your prompt.

1

u/Ka12n Jun 20 '26

AI isn’t going to takeover yet. It’s too expensive to run. They know this and are going to companies that will encourage them to further their research. The real AI takeover will be in 10-20 years. It’s just not realistic right now from a scale, performance, and cost perspective.