John Jumper, recently awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry, has announced his move to Anthropic after nearly nine years with Google DeepMind.
In a post on X, Jumper expressed gratitude to DeepMind’s CEO, Demis Hassabis, stating that Hassabis took a significant risk by allowing him to lead the AlphaFold project just six months following his PhD. He acknowledged the valuable lessons he learned from the entire GDM team about conducting excellent scientific research.
Jumper noted, “GDM is a special place, and I’ll continue to be eager to hear about the incredible discoveries they will make in the future.”
According to reports, Jumper played a crucial role in developing coding tools at Google, despite challenges in selling those tools to the business sector. In related news, Noam Shazeer, a co-founder of Character AI, also announced his departure from DeepMind, but he will be joining OpenAI.
Jumper and Hassabis received the Nobel Prize in 2024 for their contributions to AlphaFold, an AI model capable of predicting protein structures in three dimensions based on genetic sequences.
