🔍 Google just lost some of its biggest AI stars in the span of a week

🔍 Google just lost some of its biggest AI stars in the span of a week. And investors noticed. The company shed $269 billion in market value. It began on June 18, when Noam Shazeer left for OpenAI. He’s one of the co-authors of the 2017 “Attention Is All You Need” paper, the breakthrough that made today’s large language models possible. Just two days later, John Jumper joined Anthropic. Jumper won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for leading the development of AlphaFold, the AI system that solved one of biology’s biggest challenges by predicting the structures of nearly every known protein. Then came more departures. Jonas Adler, who led Google’s AI coding efforts, and Alexander Pritzel, a key expert in large-scale AI pretraining, both left for Anthropic. Both also played major roles in AlphaFold. Even Arthur Conmy, an AI safety researcher, made the jump, saying he wanted to work where AI safety was a bigger priority. The timing couldn’t be more striking. Google is expected to pour around $190 billion into AI infrastructure this year. But GPUs and data centers don’t invent breakthroughs, people do. The engineers who built Google’s advantage are increasingly choosing to build somewhere else. In AI, talent compounds faster than hardware. @aipost 🏴