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John Jumper to join Anthropic
- WarmWash 4mo agoShazeer yesterday and Jumper today....Demis is there something we need to know about?
- make3 4mo agoShazeer 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.
- Iolaum 4mo agoTwo big names left GDM recently. Could be a coincidence, but where's the fun in that? :p
- coderatlarge 4mo agoyou mean shazeer?
- overfeed 4mo agoThat'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 4mo agoWho?
- artninja1988 4mo agoHe was leading the development of AlphaFold, the AI system that predicts protein structures for which he got the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
- yuffffley 4mo agoI 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.
- dekhn 4mo agoAlphaFold is based on deep learning and it's not brute force.
- TeMPOraL 4mo agoYou could argue that training SOTA LLMs is pre-bruteforcing every problem everywhere all at once.
- tmule 4mo agoWhat brute force? Any citations?
- herunan 4mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
- mapmeld 4mo agoIf AlphaFold really is brute force on known protein problem space, would it then be usable as a model for novel proteins?
- nimchimpsky 4mo ago[dead]
- andrewstuart 4mo agoJohn Jumper what a great name sounds like a video game action hero.
- darksim905 4mo agoThe film Jumper is good fun, though it was a missed opportunity to have this be the character's name. :)
- avdelazeri 4mo agoMainstream tends to clown on Jumper, but I had a lot of fun watching it with my pals back then.
- CuriouslyC 4mo agoSomething spicy must have happened internally at Google. This rapid fire high level attrition isn't just down to the bureaucratic quagmire.
- kranke155 4mo agoIs 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.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- AgentMasterRace 4mo agoGemini is super bad, grok is actually superior most of the time and that's saying something because grok also sucks.
- throwa356262 4mo agoUsername checks out. More seriously, Grok has serious problem with bias. Since its an activist model its judgment cannot be trusted. Example: ask 50 different models if Elon Musk should be elected as the next US president. 49 will tell you this cannot happen since he was born South African. One will tell you this is an excellent idea.
- xnx 4mo agoThey 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.
- musicale 4mo agoName checks out.
- kleiba2 4mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolly_Jumper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolly_Jumper
- ransom1538 4mo agoSo Mr. Jumper. You are committed? We need people longer term here. Your boss Mr. Settles is really excited about you joining.
- freedomben 4mo agoMissed opportunity for headline: John jumper jumps to anthropic
- bigyabai 4mo agoJohn Jumper Makes The Leap
- graphime 4mo ago[dead]
- hackerbeat 4mo agoSuper Mario leaves Nintendo to focus on plumbing.
- vld_chk 4mo agoAnthropic 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 4mo agowhy so dramatic? why cant it just be a quietly competent lab, why must it be a dramatic collapse?
- greenavocado 4mo ago> why must it be a dramatic collapse? Extreme investor desire for return on capital investment, and quickly
- fhe 4mo agobecause, as Musk once said, always bet on the more interesting outcome (because we live in a simulation)
- glimshe 4mo agoGoogle at its peak, as well as Microsoft, had similarly strong teams.
- uejfiweun 4mo agoI'm starting to get the sense that Anthropic is the company that will fulfill the prophecy laid out in AI 2027.
- frays 4mo agoApart from Karpathy and now Shazeer and Jumper, who are the other top ICs in their team?
- gordonhart 4mo agoShazeer is joining OpenAI, adjust your fantasy frontier team draft picks accordingly
- SpyCoder77 4mo agoThe guy who invented jumping is joining a major AI lab?!?
- kridsdale1 4mo agoThe JMP assembly instruction is pretty important. Imagine if the inventor had royalties.
- abraxas 4mo agoSomething seems afoot at Google. The real tell will be if Demis makes a move. Jeff Dean seems more like a lifer to me.
- make3 4mo agoI 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 4mo agoGoogle 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.
- mlmonkey 4mo agoGoogle's IPO was a Dutch Auction. It's impossible to be undervalued in a Dutch Auction.
- thesmtsolver2 4mo agoWas Google preventing other search engine developers from searching for resources?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- enos_feedler 4mo agoI 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 4mo ago
- rvz 4mo agoHe 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.
- uejfiweun 4mo agoCan 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 4mo agoSeems 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.
- uejfiweun 4mo agoI'm just not sure that Google, or anyone for that matter, really has the capital to do that with Anthropic. This is a near trillion dollar company.
- CamperBob2 4mo agoA 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.
- jaggederest 4mo agoI would expect he's 6 months behind. That's exactly how much lag the open models have versus the frontier models, and have consistently the last 2-3 years. The question is, how far ahead will the frontier models be in 6 months? if it's still 6 months, open weights might have a fable equivalent model, and the frontier models will be on upwards towards ... essay, or novel, or bibliography, or whatever the next name is.
- mikert89 4mo agoAnthropic is probably approaching AGI, and everyone wants to be there for it
- sph 4mo agoSource: it came to me in a dream
- mikert89 4mo agoSource: I used fable, can project into the future
- nozzlegear 4mo agoAGI 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 4mo agoHelp 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?
- weregiraffe 4mo agoIf AGI is near, why Tesla still doesn't have real FSD?
- aabhay 4mo agoI am guessing this is related to Anthropic’s recent acquisition of Coefficient Bio, and their interest on essentially using AGI to discover novel drugs
- frays 4mo agoDemis Hassabis posted a farewell for John Jumper on X: https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2068002732250640603 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_shi 4mo agoNominative determinism.
- angoragoats 4mo ago[flagged]
- incognito124 4mo agoOh he just won this tiny award named after Alfred Nobel
- angoragoats 4mo agoCool! I’d advocate for OP to put that in the headline, then.
- brcmthrowaway 4mo agoI would just join a lab for 4 years and retire at this point.
- jatins 4mo agoYou think these people don't already have generational wealth?
- brcmthrowaway 4mo agoBefore they joined the lab?
- bmitc 4mo agoWho cares?
- brcmthrowaway 4mo agoWhy do people care when LeBron moves? Answer: people follow movements when earning tens of millions is involved.
- bmitc 4mo agoThis guy earns tens of millions of dollars?
- brcmthrowaway 4mo agoAs a Nobel winner, yes.
- bmitc 4mo agoHuh.
- HlessClaudesman 4mo agoJohn Jumper Jumps to Anthropic, was right there.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- OoTheNigerian 4mo agoDrop the "John" :)
- hsaliak 4mo agoGemini 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 4mo agoOrganizational 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 4mo agoBetween 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 4mo agothis 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.
- angoragoats 4mo agoIt’s annoying that the headline gives no context of who Jumper is, as if everyone is expected to know.
- sidibe 4mo agoGoogle 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
- frollogaston 4mo agoIt's Hacker News, a lot of people probably know. I didn't, but he has a Wikipedia page so whatever.
- 4mo ago
- ProllyInfamous 4mo agoI 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 4mo agoWell, 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 4mo agoLinkedIn 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 4mo 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Jumper
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