Nobel laureate John Jumper is leaving DeepMind for rival Anthropic

John Jumper, a recent Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry, has revealed his transition to Anthropic after spending almost nine years at Google DeepMind. In a heartfelt message shared on X, Jumper expressed gratitude towards DeepMind's CEO, Demis Hassabis, for entrusting him to lead the AlphaFold team just six months post-PhD completion. He acknowledged the invaluable lessons learned from the entire DeepMind team, stating, 'GDM is a special place, and I’ll still be excited to hear about what amazing things they discover next.' Jumper's contributions were pivotal in developing coding tools at Google, which the company has found challenging to market effectively. The news follows another significant departure from DeepMind, as Noam Shazeer, co-founder of Character AI, also announced his move to OpenAI. Jumper and Hassabis were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2024 for their groundbreaking work on AlphaFold, an AI model that accurately predicts the three-dimensional structures of proteins from their genetic sequences.