r/stocks
Google set to lose two more lead AI researchers to Anthropic
Alphabet faces investor doubts and a stock dip as key AI researchers leave for rivals Anthropic and OpenAI ahead of their IPOs.
- Key AI researchers are leaving for rivals Anthropic and OpenAI, undermining Google's AI competitiveness.
- Investor confidence is rattled, causing shares to drop as doubts grow over Google's ability to keep up in the AI race.
- Internal resource allocation issues and the lure of pre-IPO paydays at startups are driving talent away.
(Bloomberg) June 24 - Two leading artificial intelligence researchers at Alphabet Inc.’s Google are planning to leave for rival Anthropic PBC, according to people familiar with the matter, adding to a series of high-profile departures that risk undercutting the search giant’s position in AI.
Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, both viewed internally as key contributors to Google’s Gemini AI model, are set to move to the Claude maker, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity as the information is not public. Adler worked on the company’s AI coding effort and Pritzel was involved in the process of training artificial intelligence systems.
Google, an early pioneer in artificial intelligence, spent much of the current AI boom playing catch-up with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic before hitting its stride late last year with more capable models and chips. In recent days, however, the company had already lost two prominent staffers, with Nobel laureate John Jumper heading to Anthropic and star researcher Noam Shazeer going to OpenAI. Their moves rattled investors and cast new doubt on Google’s ability to compete in the fierce race to build better models.
Shares of Alphabet closed down slightly after falling as much as 1.2% during the trading day Wednesday.
The exits highlight the pressure Google faces from two startups that are on the cusp of going public, offering even well-heeled employees at Big Tech firms the chance at a rare payday by signing on before an IPO. In at least one case, a Google departure also appeared to be preceded by shifting priorities over how to allocate precious computing resources, an issue that has prompted other employees to leave the company entirely.
Shortly before Shazeer announced his plans to join OpenAI, computing power dedicated to one of his projects was reassigned to a London-based team at Google DeepMind, according to two people familiar with the matter. The move was made in an attempt to boost collaboration across teams and streamline Google’s work on pre-training, the initial phase of AI development in which models learn from massive datasets, the people said.
Adler, Pritzel, Jumper and Shazeer did not respond to requests for comment. Anthropic declined to comment. A spokesperson for Google said the company remains confident in its position in the market for AI talent and pointed to Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis’s remarks earlier this week.
“There’s a lot of talent movement between all the leading labs and we win our fair share of the top talent. We have by far the biggest and broadest research bench of any of the labs out there,” Hassabis said at an event in Cannes. “It’s a ferociously competitive market right now, the most ferociously competitive it’s ever been in the tech industry.”