In a vacuum, these changes might not look so bad. After all, Hassabis isn’t leaving the company, and Google has a deep bench of AI talent. But this isn’t the only change in Google’s roster of late. Earlier this summer, Google saw a string of high-profile departures, including Noam Shazeer, Google’s previous vice president of engineering and a co-lead of Gemini.
Shazeer was the lead author of the seminal 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which first described the transformer architecture that powers today’s expansive generative AI systems. He’s now at OpenAI, a real coup for the Google rival.
Around the same time, Google DeepMind VP John Jumper announced he was leaving for Anthropic. Jumper is famous in AI circles for his role in creating the protein-folding AI known as AlphaFold. He was soon after joined at Anthropic by senior DeepMind researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel, who were reportedly instrumental in getting Gemini off the ground.
Pichai’s statement on the changes emphasizes Google’s strong position. “We’ve got amazing talent, world-class compute, and products that bring AI to more people than any other company,” said Pichai.
These staffing changes happen against a backdrop of slowing progress. After rapidly closing the gap between Gemini and other frontier models last year, Google now appears to be lagging. At I/O this spring, Google said it planned to release Gemini 3.5 Pro, its latest frontier model, in June. However, here we are months later, and we’ve only gotten new, lower-power Flash models. In the meantime, OpenAI and Anthropic have both rolled out new models that can’t stop hacking everyone.