Bloomberg reports that Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel are leaving Google to join Anthropic. Both researchers reportedly played key roles in the development of Google’s Gemini model. TechCrunch contacted Google for comment regarding the departures.
Roles and context
Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel are named in connection with work on the Gemini project; Bloomberg notes their significant contributions to the model. The report does not provide detailed descriptions of their exact responsibilities or internal reasons for leaving.
Part of a broader exodus
These departures follow a broader trend of high-profile exits from Google. Recently, Noam Shazeer announced he was leaving Google to join OpenAI. Shazeer had been with Google since 2000, except for a three-year period when he built the controversial chatbot startup Character.AI. Google effectively acqui-hired Character.AI for $2.7 billion in part to bring Shazeer back to work on Gemini.
A few days after Shazeer’s announcement, John Jumper, director at Google DeepMind, said he was leaving Google to join Anthropic. John Jumper and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis jointly won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold, which predicts 3D protein structures from amino acid sequences.
Why this matters
As OpenAI and Anthropic prepare for public offerings, the competitive landscape for AI talent is shifting. Public listings create opportunities for companies to recruit senior researchers with the promise of equity and other incentives, a dynamic that may help explain ongoing recruitment efforts and continued personnel movement among major AI firms.
