The past two days, the biggest news has to be that DeepMind lost two heavyweights. One is Noam Shazeer, a Duke University graduate and the coding genius behind the Transformer network architecture. Absolute legend. The other is John Jumper, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry at just 39. He used to work on protein synthesis at DE Shaw, then went on to pursue a PhD at the University of Chicago. He’s originally from Little Rock, Arkansas. Noam literally reshaped the entire era of large models and was the co-lead of the Gemini project before leaving. After the underwhelming release of Flash 3.5 at Google I/O on May 20, there’s been a lot of internal turmoil. According to insiders, Noam’s management style was super intense, and many people couldn’t handle the pressure, leading to complaints. Plus, he had some irreconcilable conflicts with DeepMind veteran and Gemini’s other technical lead, Oriol Vinyals. As for John Jumper’s departure, it’s much less dramatic. It’s simply that his work at DeepMind had reached a very mature stage, and he wanted a new environment. He’s now joined Anthropic, one of the best model companies in the world, to explore new possibilities. Insiders revealed that just a month ago, John Jumper was promoted to VP and Engineering Fellow at DeepMind, but he gave up a massive amount of stock options to join Anthropic. This move reflects the same spirit he showed 15 years ago when he left DE Shaw in New York, giving up a six-figure salary to pursue a six-year PhD at the University of Chicago, earning just $30,000 a year and taking on side gigs to make ends meet. Even in such tough circumstances, his passion for scientific exploration never wavered.