Google Loses Gemini Co-Lead and Nobel Laureate in 3 Days

In the span of three days, Google lost two of the most recognizable names in its AI organization. On June 18, OpenAI confirmed it had hired Noam Shazeer — a Google vice president of engineering and co-lead of the Gemini models. A day later, on June 19, Nobel laureate John Jumper announced he was leaving Google DeepMind after nearly nine years to join Anthropic. Alphabet shares fell roughly 7% as the back-to-back departures landed.

Shazeer is among the most consequential engineers of the modern AI era: he was a co-author of the 2017 "Attention Is All You Need" paper that introduced the Transformer architecture underpinning virtually every large language model today. He later co-founded Character.AI, which Google effectively reabsorbed in a roughly $2.7 billion deal in September 2024 that brought him back in-house to help steer Gemini. Sam Altman publicly welcomed him as one of the people he had "most wanted to work with" — a pointed signal in a market where a single hire can move a roadmap.

Jumper's exit may sting even more symbolically. He shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for co-creating AlphaFold, the protein-structure breakthrough that became DeepMind's marquee scientific achievement. Demis Hassabis responded graciously to the news, writing that "what we achieved with AlphaFold changed the world, and showed the field what was possible with AI for science and medicine, lighting the way for how AI can benefit humanity." For Anthropic — reportedly valued near $1 trillion in recent funding talks — landing a Nobel-winning scientist is a statement about where it intends to compete next.

The two moves crystallize a talent war that has become as decisive as the race for compute. Frontier labs are paying extraordinary sums to pull a small pool of senior researchers, and Google's bench — long the deepest in the field — is now the one being raided. It comes as Google's rivals lock in the other scarce input alongside people: only hours earlier, Anthropic unveiled a multi-gigawatt TPU partnership with Google and Broadcom, even as it hires away Google's own scientists. Google, for its part, remains an Anthropic backer through its multi-billion-dollar investment — a reminder of how tangled these alliances and rivalries have become.

The timing is awkward for Google, which is preparing to push Gemini 3.5 Pro toward general availability. Losing a Gemini co-lead and a Nobel laureate in the same week will not derail a model already in the pipeline, but it dents the narrative that Google is the safest home for the world's best AI researchers — exactly the reputation it needs as the next model generation ships.