Google paid $2.7B for Noam Shazeer. He left in 22 months. Then a Nobel laureate walked out the same door.

Google just lost two of the most important researchers in AI history within 48 hours.

Noam Shazeer — the man who co-authored "Attention Is All You Need" and co-led Gemini — left for OpenAI on June 18.

Google paid $2.7 billion to bring him back from Character.AI less than two years ago.

The next day, John Jumper — Nobel laureate, AlphaFold creator, VP at DeepMind — announced he's joining Anthropic.

Three named departures from Google AI in rapid succession: Shazeer to OpenAI, Jumper to Anthropic, David Silver to launch his own startup.

All eight original Transformer paper authors have now left Google.

This is not a talent story. This is a structural failure.

Bloomberg reports Google has struggled to sell AI coding tools to businesses. The people who built the technology Google was supposed to sell are now building it for competitors.

For enterprises running on Google Cloud or betting on Gemini: your vendor's research bench just got gutted.

The pre-IPO talent war is real. OpenAI and Anthropic are vacuuming up the people who invented the field.

Audit your AI vendor dependencies. If your roadmap depends on Gemini, ask Google who's left to build it.

SOURCE: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/20/nobel-laureate-john-jumper-is-leaving-deepmind-for-rival-anthropic/
VERIFIED: TechCrunch, Bloomberg, CNBC, Reuters
SIGNAL: Two marquee losses in 48 hours from the lab that invented the Transformer — signals structural retention failure at Google DeepMind and shifts the competitive landscape for every enterprise betting on Gemini.