00:00Two top AI researchers are leaving Google for Anthropic.
00:03These are just the latest departures in recent days,
00:07rattling Google's AI ambitions.
00:09Bloomberg's Google reporter, Julia Love,
00:11broke the story and joins us with the details.
00:13And the story was so impactful.
00:15It was shared across industry.
00:17Let's start with those kind of two key figures.
00:19Who are they?
00:20And why it's being seen as such a blow to Google's AI efforts.
00:25Thank you, Ed.
00:26So the two senior researchers who are moving from Google to Anthropic
00:32are Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel.
00:35And both were viewed as key contributors to Gemini,
00:39which is Google's flagship AI model.
00:41And also highly regarded by their peers, I understand.
00:43Absolutely, yes, yes.
00:44Their peers were sad to see them go.
00:46Jonas Adler was playing a key role in AI coding.
00:50And Alexander Pritzel was involved on the pre-training side,
00:54which is where models are kind of trained on large quantities of data.
00:59And I think especially following the news last week of Noam Shazir moving to OpenAI
01:04and John Jumper, a Nobel laureate, heading to Anthropic,
01:07it has sparked concerns about who else may be on the way out.
01:11We've been talking about that on the show for that extended period of time, right?
01:14And it's played out in the stock.
01:16You know, Alphabet, the parent of Google, shares have been under pressure.
01:19What's the bigger picture?
01:20Like, this is a mass wave of departures, and so Gemini is in trouble?
01:25Or is it not as severe as that?
01:28To be clear, those two departures are the only names that we've reported on
01:35beyond John Jumper and Noam Shazir.
01:37We're talking about a small number of people.
01:39However, the AI talent pool, in terms of the number of people
01:43who really can move the needle on these models, is relatively small.
01:47And so individual moves, you know, can matter.
01:52Google stresses, of course, that his bench of talent is very deep.
01:55Yes, thank you.
01:55And, you know, engage with us on that story.
01:57It was a very detailed report.
01:59Was there anything else in there that we haven't got to
02:01that you think, you know, the world needs to know about?
02:04We got a little bit more color about what happened
02:07around the time of Noam Shazir's departure.
02:11Computing power is a precious resource in Google.
02:13They have a lot of computing power, but they also have a lot of mouths to feed
02:17with cloud clients, research, their popular products.
02:21And so we learned that shortly before Noam Shazir announced his departure,
02:26the computing power for one of his projects was shifted
02:30to a larger pre-training team in London.
02:34It seems it was an attempt to boost collaboration,
02:37but we're still piecing it together,
02:40but compute can be very political within Google.
02:42You know,
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