AI researchers continue to leave Google for its rivals

Google continues to lose top artificial intelligence researchers to its rivals. According to a Bloomberg report, Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, who played key roles in developing Google's Gemini model, are leaving for Anthropic. The departures follow the announcement last week by legendary AI researcher Noam Shazeer that he was leaving Google for OpenAI. Shazeer had been at Google since 2000, except for three years when he founded the controversial chatbot startup Character.AI, which Google effectively acqui-hired for $2.7 billion, partly to bring Shazeer back to work on Gemini. Just days later, Google DeepMind director John Jumper, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside Demis Hassabis for his work on AlphaFold, announced he was leaving for Anthropic. This trend could continue as OpenAI and Anthropic prepare to go public, giving them the ability to offer equity as a recruitment tool. TechCrunch has reached out to Google for comment.