Nobel laureate John Jumper announced Friday that he is leaving Google DeepMind after nearly 9 years to join Anthropic. In a post on X, Jumper thanked DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, saying Hassabis "took a real chance letting me lead the AlphaFold team just six months after finishing my PhD," and credited the "entire GDM team" for teaching him how to do great science.
According to Bloomberg, Jumper was a key member of Google's team developing coding tools, which the company has struggled to sell to businesses. Jumper and Hassabis shared the Nobel Prize in 2024 for their work on AlphaFold, an AI model that predicts the 3D structure of proteins from their genetic sequences.
Separately, Character AI co-founder Noam Shazeer also announced this week that he is leaving DeepMind to join OpenAI.