Defections from Google DeepMind prompt questions about Alphabet’s efforts to stay at the forefront of AI

Welcome to Eye on AI.  In today’s issue:

Google DeepMind loses top AI talent, raising questions about its status in the AI race

Intelligence chiefs warn about imminent AI-driven cyber risks

OpenAI expands program for cyber defenders to use AI

Lab makes RSI progress

That giant sucking sound you hear? That’s the woosh of talent streaming out of Google DeepMind and flowing to OpenAI and Anthropic. There was a time when I can remember DeepMind bragging about how no one ever left the storied AI lab. That’s certainly not the case anymore.

In recent months, a stream of well-known researchers have departed. Some, such as David Silver, one of DeepMind’s earliest employees and one of the top reinforcement learning experts in the world, have decided to launch their own startups (Silver’s is called Ineffable Intelligence). But others have joined DeepMind’s chief rivals.

This past week, two Google DeepMind stars jumped ship in just 48 hours, both departures shocking in their own way for what they may say about Google DeepMind’s prospects in the AI race. That message was not lost on investors. News of their leaving sent Google’s shares tumbling more than 5% on Monday.

A chatbot pioneer and a Nobel laureate exit

First, on Thursday, Noam Shazeer announced he was leaving to go to OpenAI. Shazeer is the famed AI researcher who helped build Google’s earliest LLM-based chatbot system, LaMDA, in 2021, and then left in frustration when the internet giant dragged its feet in commercializing it. Before he left the first time, Shazeer is thought to have authored an anonymous memo, which later leaked, that criticized Google for having become too bureaucratic, slow-moving, and risk-adverse to succeed in AI against nimbler rivals, a critique that was seemingly validated when OpenAI launched the category defining ChatGPT in November 2022 and jumped out in front, at least in the public imagination, as the leading AI lab. Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas, another Google researcher who had helped build LaMDA, cofounded the viral chatbot startup Character.ai. But then they were lured back to Google in 2024 in a deal that saw Google license Character’s technology for a reported $2.7 billion payment. Now Shazeer is leaving again.

Just days after the Shazeer news, Google DeepMind researcher John Jumper announced he too was leaving—in this case, to join Anthropic. Jumper shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis for their work creating AlphaFold, the AI system that could predict the shape of proteins from their DNA sequences, solving a 50-year grand challenge in biochemistry. After the Nobel win, Jumper had continued to work at DeepMind on AI models that could predict other properties of proteins—such as how they would bind to one another and how the small molecules often used for pharmaceuticals would likely bind to them—and he was also intrigued by the idea of using large language models, such as those that powered Google’s Gemini AI models, as tools for science.

While Google DeepMind continues to maintain a large team of AI researchers dedicated to applying AI to fundamental science challenges and has recently created a Gemini-powered system that can act as an “AI scientist” assisting researchers across different scientific domains, there is a sense that science is now less of a priority for Google DeepMind than it was in the years just prior to the launch of ChatGPT. (Isomorphic Labs, the AI drug discovery company that was spun out of DeepMind in 2021 and is also led by DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, is of course heavily focused on science—but with the aim of applying the research to commercial purposes rather than “blue-sky” scientific research). Meanwhile, Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, recently told Bloomberg’s Emily Chang that Anthropic intends to do more around biology; Jumper’s hiring is no doubt part of that plan.

Neither Shazeer or Jumper have said publicly why they’re leaving. The simplest explanation, of course, might simply be money, although there is little doubt that both Shazeer and Jumper were already extremely well-compensated. Shazeer is thought to have made hundreds of millions of dollars from the Character.ai licensing deal that brought him back to Google. (Presumably any required earn out period has ended.) And both Shazeer and Jumper were likely among the class of Google DeepMind researchers that have been awarded bushels of a special class of Google stock options that vest on an accelerated schedule, a tactic Google has had to adopt to prevent top talent from being lured away by gargantuan pay packages at places like Meta’s Superintelligence Lab. But, still, there’s a difference between being merely rich and the kind of generational wealth that the two might realize when Anthropic and OpenAI IPO, something both companies are expected to do in the coming months.

That said, money seems an unlikely explanation. I don’t know Shazeer, but as I said, he is likely already a multi-multi-millionaire. As for Jumper, I’ve interviewed him numerous times over the past four years, for both Fortune stories and for my book, Mastering AI. He doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who is primarily motivated by money and I don’t think he’d leave Google DeepMind unless he thought the scientific opportunity at Anthropic was actually better—which is much worse news for Google DeepMind.

Is Google DeepMind dropping out of the lead AI pack?

Industry watchers are wondering aloud whether the AI lab is slipping back from the lead pack in the AI race. Its top AI models, Gemini 3.5 Flash and Gemini 3.1 Pro, are often ranked outside the top five places on various AI benchmark leaderboards, having fallen behind models from Anthropic and OpenAI, as........

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