John Jumper to join Anthropic

https://twitter.com/JohnJumperSci/status/2068001285173834106

by artninja1988 • 1 month ago

170 147 1 month ago

twitter.com

Iolaum• 1 month ago

Two big names left GDM recently. Could be a coincidence, but where's the fun in that? :p

coderatlarge• 1 month ago

you mean shazeer?

overfeed2• 1 month ago

That's meaningless without knowing many big names remain, and how much "big names" influence future outcomes. Google seems to have a knack for making names big

SilverElfin• 1 month ago

Who?

artninja1988• 1 month ago

He was leading the development of AlphaFold, the AI system that predicts protein structures for which he got the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

yuffffley• 1 month ago

I remember that.

That was when they realized the deep learning was largely unnecessary, and they could just use their massive compute resources to brute force the problem space.

Proving that we would greatly benefit from using our compute resources for science rather than showing ads, and then we just kept showing ads.

andrewstuart• 1 month ago

John Jumper what a great name sounds like a video game action hero.

darksim905• 1 month ago

The film Jumper is good fun, though it was a missed opportunity to have this be the character's name. :)

avdelazeri• 1 month ago

Mainstream tends to clown on Jumper, but I had a lot of fun watching it with my pals back then.

CuriouslyC• 1 month ago

Something spicy must have happened internally at Google. This rapid fire high level attrition isn't just down to the bureaucratic quagmire.

kranke155• 1 month ago

Is it possible they are just falling behind ?

Their newest model wasn’t really SOTA. And honestly fable 5 was the most human like model I’d ever tried. It was an incredible jump.

And recently lots of Claude users at r/ClaudeAI are noticing Opus 4.8 has really increased in capability. Not new things but maybe redirected compute. It just feels like one of the best models ever, maybe because the compute that was previously assigned to Fable has been redirected? It feels incredible.

AgentMasterRace• 1 month ago

Gemini is super bad, grok is actually superior most of the time and that's saying something because grok also sucks.

xnx3• 1 month ago

They almost certainly wanted 3.5 Pro out for Google IO a few weeks ago. They're still crunching on it. No ETA given. Would be fascinating to read about the behind the scenes stories (failed training run?) if they ever get told.

basch2• 1 month ago

from the looks of it, 3.5 Flash is still better than most models

https://artificialanalysis.ai/articles/glm-5-2-is-the-new-le...

The idea of "falling behind" when you can leapfrog each other every six months leads me to believe it has to be more than just "falling behind" for one cycle. It's a culture, process, red tape, focus, or mandate problem of some sort. Something not as easily correctable preparing for next launch.

thewebguyd2• 1 month ago

noticing Opus 4.8 has really increased in capability

I've definitely noticed it, at least for doing backend C#/dotnet. Its insanely good, I haven't had to babysit much at all this week.

make34• 1 month ago

you can't know if an improvement is just due to compute, this was a lesson of the early scaling, the whole emergence phenomena, new capabilities emerge even only from more compute & data

pbgcp20263• 1 month ago

"fable 5 was the most human like model" I am laughing. There is simply no other model as good as Gemini 3.0 Pro. 2.5 was fine. 3.1 is Ok. 3.0 was a masterpiece. Compared to Opus 4.5. (yes, both got killed to prioritise "coding monkey assistants".)

jatins3• 1 month ago

I think they'll catch up in pure model capabilities but they do such a terrible job of making products from which to use their models that having the best model doesn't end up mattering.

Is Gemini good at writing code? I am sure it is. But where is their Codex? And no, antigravity isn't it.

Is Gemini good at making visualizations? I am sure it is. But where are artifact or visualise skill in gemini.google.com similar to what's available on claude.ai?

What is an average user going to do raw model capability if the product surface isn't expressive enough?

HlessClaudesman2• 1 month ago

Google's AI is hamstrung by a culture of safetyisim, by that I mean going beyond what we can all recognise as safe limits to protect the user from imaginary ephemeral things like cultural harms.

So maximal safety at all costs is in itself a cost. They can spend billions on AI but that spend is down the toilet if the user bounces because the AI's persona is a relentless politically correct scold.

DontchaKnowit• 1 month ago

I reallt think forum comments are heavily astrotrufed. Me and all my coworkers agree Opus performance has been horrible for the last to months or so.

I went from spending 20-60 dollars a day in api fees down to like 5 dollars a day cause I have had to limit my use to things I know it performs reliably on.

squidbeak• 1 month ago

Be fair - Gemini 3.5 hasn't been released yet. You're talking about Gemini's flash model, but when are flash models ever SOTA?

michaelbuckbee• 1 month ago

Vesting schedule?

whiplash451• 1 month ago

Maybe because they know where things are going with Gemini (more ads to your face) while Anthropic might, for once, have a different story.

When personal finance is not the bottleneck anymore, the new criteria becomes "vision" and "stacked talent".

IncreasePosts2• 1 month ago

Maybe Google doesn't want to pay out billions to a handful of engineers?

mlmonkey5• 1 month ago

LOL ... after character.AI ?

nowittyusername• 1 month ago

I think its google doing what theve always done, make a great *thing then ignore it. The models are great their agentic harness systems are really poor though, compared to codex cli and claude code cli its a mess.

idorosen• 1 month ago

Why invent conspiracy theories? Occam's razor: They are leaving for companies that have filed for upcoming IPOs, so it could just as well be compensation.

david_shi3• 1 month ago

The economics of working at a pre-IPO company that will likely have a successful IPO and a 20+ year post-IPO company are also very different.

make34• 1 month ago

in theory the IPO pricing is already set

pbgcp20263• 1 month ago

... yep and kxm Bessent kxm helped to set it. Anthropic shot themselves in a foot. Twice LOL

mlmonkey5• 1 month ago

He won the Nobel. He made enough from Google to last 7 lifetimes. He does not need the money!

barbarr• 1 month ago

He doesn't need the money though. I bet there's something cultural or structural going on at GDM that made him want to leave.

pbgcp20263• 1 month ago

Too many mid-management from Amazon joined plus GRAD bullshit. But it's good for stock price, so I am buying more Google

fhe2• 1 month ago

I felt Hassabis' heart was never in consumer applications or even LLMs. He'd much rather be doing scientific research.

cloche• 1 month ago

He's basically said as much directly. I think it was in his book that he would like to get back to research at some point in the future. If he had things his way, AI would still not be public and would be used for advancing science only. Then there'd be no competitive interests pulling them into consumer products.

mlmonkey5• 1 month ago

Here's my read. Take it for what you paid for it ... it comes from a couple of decades of experience in research labs and top companies.

Google appears to be falling behind in the AGI race. The leadership (MBAs) do what clueless leadership always does: they start cracking the whips, bring the knives out. People like Jumper, Shazeer, Dean, etc. are not built for fighting political battles; they're built for solving tough problems! What MBAs don't understand is that researchers at this level put a tremendous amount of pressure on themselves; and this internal pressure is far beyond what any external entity can apply. So, when MBAs start hassling top researchers with "so ... what have you done lately?" and "what are you working on? Is it important?" and "when are we getting AGI (with a smirk)" type of questions, then it feels really really grating: If I knew a sure path to the goal, I would work 24x7 to get there, dammit!

xnx3• 1 month ago

It seems extremely unlikely that "MBAs" are bossing around any of the frontier AI teams at Google.

musicale• 1 month ago

Name checks out.

kleiba2• 1 month ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolly_Jumper

ransom1538• 1 month ago

So Mr. Jumper. You are committed? We need people longer term here. Your boss Mr. Settles is really excited about you joining.

freedomben• 1 month ago

Missed opportunity for headline: John jumper jumps to anthropic

bigyabai• 1 month ago

John Jumper Makes The Leap

hackerbeat• 1 month ago

Super Mario leaves Nintendo to focus on plumbing.

vld_chk• 1 month ago

Anthropic legit builds one the strongest if not the strongest IC team in the history of computational technology. They are insanely stacked on talent, and either we will witness a legendary run, or a new LTCM

swyx• 1 month ago

why so dramatic? why cant it just be a quietly competent lab, why must it be a dramatic collapse?

greenavocado• 1 month ago

why must it be a dramatic collapse?

Extreme investor desire for return on capital investment, and quickly

fhe2• 1 month ago

because, as Musk once said, always bet on the more interesting outcome (because we live in a simulation)

glimshe• 1 month ago

Google at its peak, as well as Microsoft, had similarly strong teams.

uejfiweun3• 1 month ago

I'm starting to get the sense that Anthropic is the company that will fulfill the prophecy laid out in AI 2027.

frays2• 1 month ago

Apart from Karpathy and now Shazeer and Jumper, who are the other top ICs in their team?

gordonhart• 1 month ago

Shazeer is joining OpenAI, adjust your fantasy frontier team draft picks accordingly

crypto420• 1 month ago

Carlini

kh9000• 1 month ago

And yet they can’t build a TUI that scrolls without flickering or uses a reasonable amount of memory

SpyCoder77• 1 month ago

The guy who invented jumping is joining a major AI lab?!?

kridsdale1• 1 month ago

The JMP assembly instruction is pretty important. Imagine if the inventor had royalties.

abraxas• 1 month ago

Something seems afoot at Google. The real tell will be if Demis makes a move. Jeff Dean seems more like a lifer to me.

make34• 1 month ago

I just think that people are running to pre IPO Anthropic to make bank.

It also feels like Anthropic is the new Google though. They actually try to not be evil, and are actually at the frontier of new tech.

argee• 1 month ago

Google was famously undervalued at IPO, even relative to its value back then (that is, ignoring the wild upside that actualized). It’s likely not the new Google from a shareholder upside perspective, given the hype.

thesmtsolver2• 1 month ago

Was Google preventing other search engine developers from searching for resources?

enos_feedler• 1 month ago

I mean, just saying the new guy is trying not to be evil does not give any credence to some meaningful differentiation over the long term. Won't they just eventually be evil too? Seems odd to continue to trust the early thinking of long term companies. Haven't we been burned enough?

lachlanj• 1 month ago

Maybe this a a naive take but I see Demis as future Google CEO candidate. If AI is really the future, he is much better suited to lead the company.

seydor2• 1 month ago

The scientist who works at night and sleep at day? I don't think he s the managerial type

jatins3• 1 month ago

Demis is practically a co-CEO at this point. If he leaves, that'd be a huge of trust in Google.

WarmWash2• 1 month ago

Shazeer yesterday and Jumper today....Demis is there something we need to know about?

make34• 1 month ago

Shazeer is mostly an IC, weirdly enough (source: I worked with him).

Demis is the CEO of DeepMind, it's completely different.

Jumper.. the AlphaFold team left & made Isomorphic. I was always surprised that Jumper hadn't gone with them.

rvz• 1 month ago

He will be back at Google after the Anthropic IPO.

Seems like everyone here is easily fooled by the Anthropic hype. After the IPO, Anthropic won't be like the daycare it is today.

Their main competitors are the chinese labs which are racing all their prices down close to $0.

uejfiweun3• 1 month ago

Can you go into a bit more detail about what exactly it is that you are predicting? This is interesting, and definitely cuts against the grain that the rest of these comments are going with.

theturtletalks• 1 month ago

Seems like what Shazeer did with Character AI. He started it and then Google licensed to bring him and some of the team back after some time.

Not a bad playbook. If you’re important to the company, leave and start your own company. Then play the M&A game and you can clean up nicely.

CamperBob2• 1 month ago

A lot depends on whether the z.ai CEO, who just released the first freely-available Opus-class model weights, is blowing smoke when he claims he's less than a year away from achieving Fable-level performance.

If he walks the talk, I really do not understand how either OpenAI or Anthropic is going to justify the twelve-digit valuations they are hoping for. They will just be some people who bought a domain name and rented some GPUs.

black_knight• 1 month ago

With Anthropic going public, I wonder how long until enshittification sets in for LLMs. I guess as soon as they have figured out a way to lock-in users and growth slows down.

frollogaston3• 1 month ago

Might never happen since these are paid services. Maybe for the free tier, if that even continues to exist which I'm betting it won't. Even Gemini has already started paywalling features that used to be free.

mikert892• 1 month ago

Anthropic is probably approaching AGI, and everyone wants to be there for it

sph• 1 month ago

Source: it came to me in a dream

mikert892• 1 month ago

Source: I used fable, can project into the future

nozzlegear• 1 month ago

AGI is a convenient myth that the big American AI companies use to continue breathlessly marketing their products to the people and intellectuals who would, under any other circumstance, consider themselves rational and immune to such tricks.

euleriancon• 1 month ago

Help me understand this viewpoint that AGI being possible in the near-ish future is a myth, I see it repeated quite a lot.

I've been in NLP since the LSTM days and it's hard for me to look at LLMs and not just think they are incredible. It's truly a different level of expressiveness. So much of capabilities research is pointing to LLMs effectively learning a world model.

RLVR is also proving really effective. It is hard for me to imagine a world in the future where LLMs aren't at human level performance across a wide variety of tasks.

I fully acknowledge that current LLM labs have a financial interest in people believing AGI is very near, but from what I'm reading in the literature and seeing myself experimenting with the SOTA models it doesn't seem totally unreasonable.

What evidence are you seeing that makes you confident that AGI in the soon-ish future is a complete myth?

seydor2• 1 month ago

They are approaching AGI and thus they need more humans?

aabhay• 1 month ago

I am guessing this is related to Anthropic’s recent acquisition of Coefficient Bio, and their interest on essentially using AGI to discover novel drugs

frays2• 1 month ago

Demis Hassabis posted a farewell for John Jumper on X: https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2068002732250640603

Thanks John for an extraordinary partnership and wonderful collaboration over the past 9 years! What we achieved with AlphaFold changed the world, and showed the field what was possible with AI for science and medicine, lighting the way for how AI can benefit humanity.

david_shi3• 1 month ago

Nominative determinism.

brcmthrowaway4• 1 month ago

I would just join a lab for 4 years and retire at this point.

jatins3• 1 month ago

You think these people don't already have generational wealth?

brcmthrowaway4• 1 month ago

Before they joined the lab?

bmitc3• 1 month ago

Who cares?

brcmthrowaway4• 1 month ago

Why do people care when LeBron moves? Answer: people follow movements when earning tens of millions is involved.

bmitc3• 1 month ago

This guy earns tens of millions of dollars?

HlessClaudesman2• 1 month ago

John Jumper Jumps to Anthropic, was right there.

OoTheNigerian• 1 month ago

Drop the "John" :)

hsaliak• 1 month ago

Gemini fumbled not on the models but on the basics.

Gemini 3.1 flash was actually an amazing model to code with and their 20 dollar AI plans had solid value, but they locked it all behind 429s, needless gatekeeping of clients and poor product differentiation even among internal offerings. Users moved on. To claude for the best product, to OpenAI for the non gatekept API access. It’s hard to bring them back.

energy123• 1 month ago

Organizational issues probably. As a user of Gemini for half a year I was stunned at the amount of bugs and lag for one of their flagship products.

Their devs are not incompetent so there must be some extreme dysfunction for that to be possible at the org level, where the IC is either not allowed to fix the bugs or doesn't want to fix them.

Either way that dysfunction is probably not limited to just the Gemini UI team.

kingkongjaffa• 1 month ago

Between this and Shazeer you guys are idolizing individuals in an unhealthy way IMO.

Why are we keeping tabs on researchers moving around?

You're talking about them like people talk about the NFL trading players or (football) soccer teams making recordbreaking player transfers.

someone further down wrote

Anthropic legit builds one the strongest if not the strongest IC team in the history of computational technology.

What a weird thing to say. It's not a team sport where you support 'sides'.

manc_lad• 1 month ago

this is a natural human trait. soap operas, sports, businesses, music.

there are also real implications. assuming money is not the only factor in moving to anthropic, it does help guide insight into where innovation might be and where to put your AI spend. a decision which could result in real returns for individuals and companies.

angoragoats2• 1 month ago

It’s annoying that the headline gives no context of who Jumper is, as if everyone is expected to know.

sidibe• 1 month ago

Google has been bleeding talent for decades, though few people have ever heard of them before they left google. Like when John Giannendra left it was the first time I'd ever heard of him but it was made out like he was a key person and big blow for Google. Every self driving car company came out of ex Google people as well, same w/OpenAi. The thing is Google research orgs have always been much bigger than any competitors, they'll be shedding people forever but there's a lot more where that came from

frollogaston3• 1 month ago

It's Hacker News, a lot of people probably know. I didn't, but he has a Wikipedia page so whatever.

baobabKoodaa• 1 month ago

KRAZAM made a skit about this. You would like it.

banana_sandwich• 1 month ago

why is it unhealthy?

jwithington• 1 month ago

What a weird thing to say. It's not a team sport where you support 'sides'.

It is if you have equity!

thorum• 1 month ago

The team with the most star power and hype tends to attract the best young talent.

If the next big breakthrough in AI comes from Anthropic, good chance it comes from some genius you’ve never heard of who decided to work there because of [famous researcher].

frollogaston3• 1 month ago

It is like NFL trading players, what's wrong with that? Not that either should be idolized, but they're paid a lot for a reason.

solarkraft• 1 month ago

Why not, really? People have different (though likely conflicting) views on the company and it’s an interesting (and potentially profitable) space to follow.

I‘d argue it’s more meaningful than sports, which makes it more interesting to follow.

Of course the sports aspects are silly, but maybe they‘re just a fun way to keep track. Happens to other popular companies in the tech sector as well.

ProllyInfamous• 1 month ago

I did not "know" John personally, but we attended the same undergraduate program, concurrently. My workstudy job was supporting engineering/hardware for his specific school/program.

Nothing but nice things were ever heard about him. In a school of egos, his was approachably humble [†]... reasoning and facts seemed to make him tick. My twin actually had classes with him (small school), but also didn't know him well... but knew he was a swell guy. None of his IT tickets were ever typical "rude rich Vandy kid" – he could solve/delegate most his own problems.

So glad to see Vanderbilt secure yet another humble Laureate (Muhammud Yunis won his Nobel while we all were attending, I believe the previous alumnus-so).

Keep it humble, fellow knowledge-seeker Human John. Howdy from KissamKissam.

[†] most Obviously Brilliant-types "come off" as I_went_to_Harvard arrogant; not John ("awe" of his obvious brilliance?)

geodel• 1 month ago

Well, tons of top people left Google when Facebook was up and coming. Its nothing new. Google can't really do much for people who've made up their mind.

But yeah conspiracy theoretical approach would generate lot of discussion on this rather normal thing happening.

isodev• 1 month ago

LinkedIn is right there for “career updates”.

Nobody really knows or cares about Mr Jumper there. Congrats on his new role in converting humanity’s achievements into slop.

dewitt• 1 month ago

Nobody really knows or cares about Mr Jumper

There's no place in polite company for comments like this, and you could be trolling. But since you also simply might not know:

John Jumper won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024 for his contributions to AlphaFold and is a Fellow of the Royal Society. Among the more influential scientists of our time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Jumper

John Jumper to join Anthropic

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