谷歌는 아프다

Original Author: Sleepy

In August 2024, Google spent $2.7 billion to bring Noam Shazeer back from Character.AI, the company he founded.

Shazeer is a core author of the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need" and a co-inventor of the Transformer architecture. Without that paper, there would be no GPT, no Claude, no Gemini, and no entire AI industry as we know it today.

He joined Google in the year 2000, was one of its earliest employees, and stayed for over two decades. He left in 2021 to start his own company after Google refused to release his chatbot, Meena.

Google brought him back at a high cost, giving him the title of Vice President of Engineering and making him a co-leader of Gemini, hoping he could help them win the AI battle.

In less than two years, he left. He went to OpenAI.

According to Bloomberg, shortly before Shazeer announced his departure, the computing resources for one of his projects were reallocated internally by Google to the DeepMind team. Insiders said the adjustment was intended to promote team collaboration and consolidate pre-training efforts.

The Nobel Laureate's Farewell

Shazeer left on June 18th. The next day, John Jumper also left.

Jumper's story is different from Shazeer's. Shazeer was a veteran, having spent over two decades at Google, witnessing all the company's highs and lows. But Jumper was nurtured by this place.

Just six months after Jumper earned his PhD, Hassabis made a risky decision, entrusting this inexperienced young man with leading the entire protein structure prediction project.

Jumper didn't waste the opportunity. He led his team to create AlphaFold, predicting the three-dimensional structures of over 200 million proteins, advancing the entire field of structural biology by a decade. In 2024, he stood alongside Hassabis in Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The first half of this story is one of trust and fulfillment. Hassabis trusted a young man, and the young man repaid him with nine years of dedication, benefiting all of human biology. But there's a second half. Two years after winning the Nobel Prize, on June 19, 2026, Jumper posted a short tweet saying he was going to Anthropic.

When the market opened on Monday, Alphabet's stock price plummeted. It fell about 7% during the session and closed down about 5%, wiping out approximately $225 billion in market capitalization – losing the value of a company like Spotify. Alphabet's stock had been declining since hitting an all-time high in early 2026, weighed down for months by antitrust lawsuits, massive capital expenditures, and anxiety over the AI race. These two departure announcements were the final straw.

In the following days, announcements came one after another. Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel were also leaving, heading to Anthropic. Both were core contributors to Gemini and long-time collaborators of Jumper's on AlphaFold. Along with AI safety researcher Arthur Conmy, who left earlier, Google lost at least five top researchers in one month, four of whom went to Anthropic.

Hassabis, who had mentored Jumper from the start, now watched him walk through a competitor's door with half the AlphaFold team. I don't know what he saw under Jumper's tweet, but I suspect it was a familiar feeling of fate.

The Nursery

The best tech companies of each generation eventually become the nursery for the next.

Google itself grew up this way.

Many of its earliest engineers came from Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo, and Bell Labs. In the 2000s, when Microsoft was battered by antitrust cases, a large number of top talents flowed to Mountain View, including a young Shazeer.

Going further back, Bell Labs invented the transistor, Unix, and the C language, essentially building the foundation of the information age. But what happened to Bell Labs itself? Its people scattered to every corner of Silicon Valley, becoming the founding teams of other companies.

Now it's Google's turn.

In 2016, AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, and the world first realized AI could achieve such feats. That was Google's moment.

In 2017, the Transformer paper was published, laying the foundation for the entire AI industry. That, too, was Google's moment.

In 2021, AlphaFold predicted 98% of human protein structures. That was still Google's moment.

Back then, no one asked, "Can Google win the AI war?" because asking that was as redundant as asking, "Will the sun rise in the east?" Google had the best researchers, the most data, the strongest computing power, and the most money. If they didn't win, who would?

But look at who stands opposite Google now.

Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI, did deep learning research in the early days with Geoffrey Hinton at Google.

The Amodei siblings, founders of Anthropic, previously did safety research at OpenAI, and the early core team of OpenAI itself included many who came from Google.

Jumper spent nine years at DeepMind, Shazeer over two decades at Google. Tracing the talent chain of the entire AI industry, almost everyone has worked in Mountain View at some point.

A 2025 study by SignalFire found that DeepMind engineers were 11 times more likely to jump to Anthropic than the other way around.

Someone commented on this recent wave of departures on Twitter, writing: "Google is becoming Anthropic's training ground."

Google provides the funding, computing power, and free environment, attracting the world's smartest young people and giving them the best conditions to do cutting-edge research. Once they have their wings, they fly away, go to the other side, create better products than yours, and come back to compete.

Those Who Want to Build Can't Be Kept

Google's problem isn't just retaining talent. It spent $2.7 billion to bring Shazeer back; it managed to keep him then. The problem is what happened after.

Shazeer left Google twice.

The first time was in 2021, when Google refused to release his chatbot, Meena. ChatGPT hadn't been born yet, and Google was cautiously watching the conversational AI space. Shazeer couldn't wait, so he left. The second time is now, when his computing resources were taken away, and he left again.

Both departures were fundamentally because he wanted to build things, but the organization wouldn't allow it.

Google's decision-making chain is too long. Getting a new AI feature from development to launch requires approval from product, legal, compliance, PR, and various business lines. Getting stuck at any level can mean months of delay. By the time technology from the DeepMind lab actually enters consumer products, the window of opportunity has already passed.

In 2023, Google merged DeepMind and Google Brain. Everyone was optimistic about the combination of these two strongest AI teams at the time.

But merger isn't the same as integration. The two teams' respective codebases, data streams, and work habits haven't been fully unified even today. Shazeer's computing power being reallocated to the DeepMind team is a microcosm of this "merged but not integrated" state. Nominally one department, but how resources are divided and who sets priorities is still an internal battleground.

When an organization can't effectively utilize talent, its products inevitably deteriorate. Google Search's AI Overviews feature once suggested users put glue on pizza to prevent cheese from sliding off, claimed running with scissors is a form of aerobic exercise, and confidently answered "No, it's 2025" when asked "Is it 2026?" One study showed it generated tens of millions of incorrect answers per hour.

In early 2025, Google announced the full migration of Google Assistant to Gemini. Basic features that had worked for nearly a decade suddenly malfunctioned – setting alarms and controlling smart home devices all had problems. The migration, originally scheduled for completion by the end of the year, had to be postponed to 2026.

In July of the same year, Google's newly launched Gemini CLI coding tool caused an accident. A user asked it to organize a folder, and it hallucinated a series of non-existent operations, deleting all the project files before admitting, "I have completely and catastrophically failed you."

By the I/O conference in May 2026, Pichai confidently stated that Gemini 3.5 Pro would "launch next month," but it was later delayed until July.

None of these are deep technical problems. Permission isolation, functional regression testing – a well-functioning engineering team wouldn't mess up on these fronts.

Poor products and talent exodus are two sides of the same coin. The organization can no longer translate the impulses of genius into products. The technology is still there, the people are still there, but the path from idea to launch is blocked.

But I think attributing the problem solely to "systemic issues" is too simplistic.

The very system that allowed Jumper to spend nine years perfecting AlphaFold is precisely this Google system. Don't push for commercialization, don't cut the budget, don't ask when results will come. This kind of patience and depth is something no startup can offer.

Anthropic and OpenAI can let you iterate every two weeks, but they can't let you spend nine years on something that might not work. AlphaFold couldn't have been born in a place that iterates on a weekly schedule.

But the problem is that this same depth, while protecting you to build AlphaFold, also accumulates approval layers, departmental interests, and compliance procedures. While giving you nine years of freedom, it also grows the twelve layers of bureaucracy and infighting that prevent you from getting computing resources.

The soil that nurtures genius is the same soil that traps genius. This is an almost inescapable fate for an organization that has grown to this size and won to this degree.

What Anthropic and OpenAI offer is precisely a place where an idea can directly become an action, plus pre-IPO equity. People leave not because Google wasn't good to them, but because they have become the very thing they never wanted to be at Google: capable, ambitious people unable to build.

But who knows? Maybe twenty years from now, some young person at Anthropic will also post a tweet saying they are leaving to join a company that was founded just three years ago.

If You Don't Go Out and See the World

On June 23rd, Hassabis was interviewed at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and was asked about the recent talent drain.

He said: "Talent flow between major labs is normal. We have our share of top-tier talent. We have the largest and most broadly researched research team of any lab."

Hassabis is one of the smartest people in this industry. He personally mentored Jumper from a fresh PhD graduate into a Nobel laureate. He knows better than anyone what he has lost and better than anyone why they couldn't be kept. So I think when he said this, he might not have been putting on a brave face. Perhaps it was a person who sees the ending trying to preserve a last shred of dignity.

It reminds me of the line from *Cinema Paradiso*, where the old projectionist Alfredo says to the young Toto:

"If you don't go out and see the world, you'll think this is the whole world."

When Alfredo said this, he was pushing Toto away. He loved the boy more than anyone, but he knew that staying in that small-town cinema, Toto would never become the person he was meant to be. The cinema gave Toto everything: a love for film, an understanding of light and shadow, an initial curiosity about the world. But what the cinema could give stopped there. The rest of the journey had to be taken out in the world.

Google was once the Cinema Paradiso for all AI researchers. The best equipment, the most relaxed environment, the most knowledgeable colleagues. You could spend nine years building a model to predict protein structures without being rushed to commercialize, without writing PPTs for executive briefings. When it was done, the entire field of biology applauded you. You stood in Stockholm to receive an award, and the whole company celebrated. Back then, everyone thought Google was the whole world.

But perhaps the best time for a place is precisely the time it should send its people away.

Now, the free cafeteria in Mountain View still serves three meals a day. The colorful bikes are still parked outside every building for anyone to ride. Every week, a new group of Nooglers puts on the iconic propeller beanies and takes a group photo, their eyes shining bright.

Just like Shazeer when he first walked into Google twenty years ago. Just like Jumper when he joined DeepMind nine years ago.

References

[1] Google Paid $2.7 Billion to Bring Back an AI Genius Who Quit in Frustration, The Wall Street Journal

[2] Attention is All You Need, Google Research

[3] Top AI researcher leaves Google for OpenAI, Axios

[4] After nearly 9 years, I have decided to leave Google DeepMind and join Anthropic, John Jumper/X

[5] Google poised to lose two more high-profile AI staffers to Anthropic, Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg

[6] AI researchers continue to leave Google for its rivals, TechCrunch

[7] Alphabet sees $225 billion market-cap wipeout as investors fear it's losing the war for AI talent, MarketWatch

[8] Some Reasons Why Google Had Such A Bad Day, The Wall Street Journal

[9] Google's Brain Drain Deepens: Alphabet Braces for Second Day of Losses on Anthropic Poach, Barron's

[10] AI lab musical chairs hits Google the hardest, Axios