Nobel laureate John Jumper leaves DeepMind for rival Anthropic
John Jumper, co-recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, is leaving Google DeepMind to join Anthropic after nearly nine years. Separately, Character AI co-founder Noam Shazeer also announced his departure from DeepMind this week to join OpenAI.
John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on AlphaFold, announced Friday that he is moving to Anthropic after "nearly 9 years" at Google DeepMind.
In a post on X, Jumper wrote that DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis "took a real chance letting me lead the AlphaFold team just six months after finishing my PhD, and the entire GDM team taught me so much about how to do great science." He added, "GDM is a special place, and I’ll still be excited to hear about what amazing things they discover next."
According to Bloomberg, Jumper was a key member of Google's team developing coding tools, which the company has struggled to sell to businesses.
This week also saw Character AI co-founder Noam Shazeer announce he is leaving DeepMind — though in his case, he is joining OpenAI.
Jumper and Hassabis won the Nobel Prize in 2024 for AlphaFold, an AI model that can predict the 3D structure of proteins based on their genetic sequences.
