John Jumper, a vice president at Google DeepMind and 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate, is leaving Google’s AI unit to join the AI startup Anthropic. He has worked at DeepMind for nearly nine years and was considered a key figure in the team building its AI models.
Jumper and DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis shared the Nobel Prize for developing AlphaFold, the protein-structure prediction model. Writing on X over the weekend, Jumper said, “After almost 9 years, I decided to leave Google DeepMind and join Anthropic (after a little time to recharge).” He added that Hassabis “took a real risk” in letting him lead the AlphaFold team only six months after he finished his PhD, and said the team taught him “so much about how to do great science.”
He also described DeepMind as “a great place” and said he remained excited to hear about its future discoveries. Hassabis responded: “Thank you to John for an extraordinary partnership and great collaboration over nine years! What we achieved with AlphaFold changed the world, showed what can be achieved with AI for science and medicine, and charted the path for how AI can benefit humanity.”
Jumper’s departure comes soon after Noam Shazeer, Google vice president of engineering and one of the leaders of Gemini development, left for OpenAI. Shazeer had previously left Google in 2021 to cofound Character.AI, then returned about two years ago after Google bought the startup for $2.7 billion.
