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John Jumper to join Anthropic
- mikert89 3mo agoAnthropic is probably approaching AGI, and everyone wants to be there for it
- sph 3mo agoSource: it came to me in a dream
- mikert89 3mo agoSource: I used fable, can project into the future
- nozzlegear 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo agoIf AGI is near, why Tesla still doesn't have real FSD?
- balherian 3mo agoergo propter hoc?
- weregiraffe 3mo agoNo. AGI should be able to drive a car. Unfortunately an LLM is not AGI, and video recording is not text.
- flebron 3mo agoI think you might be thinking of "AGI" as some sort of point in time, where something happens and everyone all at once has some technology. Not only is the progress towards AGI gradual, it's also very jagged in both capabilities and especially who has access to it. It's irrelevant whether a particular company, like Cisco, Pepsi, or Tesla, has some capability, when there exists a different research lab that is at the frontier, approaching AGI from some direction.
- rossjudson 3mo ago- Liability - What can you really fit in HW4? - No right answers in many situations. - But mostly liability. It's pretty good.
- gopher_space 3mo 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. Nobody will buy an AI with enough context to develop critiques of their own organizational structure.
- seydor 3mo agoThey are approaching AGI and thus they need more humans?
- hansmayer 3mo ago[dead]
- bmitc 3mo agoWho cares?
- brcmthrowaway 3mo agoWhy do people care when LeBron moves? Answer: people follow movements when earning tens of millions is involved.
- bmitc 3mo agoThis guy earns tens of millions of dollars?
- brcmthrowaway 3mo agoAs a Nobel winner, yes.
- bmitc 3mo agoHuh.
- graphime 3mo ago[dead]
- Iolaum 3mo agoTwo big names left GDM recently. Could be a coincidence, but where's the fun in that? :p
- coderatlarge 3mo agoyou mean shazeer?
- overfeed 3mo 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
- andrewstuart 3mo agoJohn Jumper what a great name sounds like a video game action hero.
- darksim905 3mo agoThe film Jumper is good fun, though it was a missed opportunity to have this be the character's name. :)
- avdelazeri 3mo agoMainstream tends to clown on Jumper, but I had a lot of fun watching it with my pals back then.
- SilverElfin 3mo agoWho?
- artninja1988 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo agoAlphaFold is based on deep learning and it's not brute force.
- TeMPOraL 3mo agoYou could argue that training SOTA LLMs is pre-bruteforcing every problem everywhere all at once.
- tmule 3mo agoWhat brute force? Any citations?
- herunan 3mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
- mapmeld 3mo agoIf AlphaFold really is brute force on known protein problem space, would it then be usable as a model for novel proteins?
- CuriouslyC 3mo agoSomething spicy must have happened internally at Google. This rapid fire high level attrition isn't just down to the bureaucratic quagmire.
- kranke155 3mo 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 3mo ago[deleted]
- AgentMasterRace 3mo agoGemini is super bad, grok is actually superior most of the time and that's saying something because grok also sucks.
- throwa356262 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo agoName checks out.
- kleiba2 3mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolly_Jumper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolly_Jumper
- ransom1538 3mo agoSo Mr. Jumper. You are committed? We need people longer term here. Your boss Mr. Settles is really excited about you joining.
- freedomben 3mo agoMissed opportunity for headline: John jumper jumps to anthropic
- bigyabai 3mo agoJohn Jumper Makes The Leap
- hackerbeat 3mo agoSuper Mario leaves Nintendo to focus on plumbing.
- vld_chk 3mo 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 3mo agowhy so dramatic? why cant it just be a quietly competent lab, why must it be a dramatic collapse?
- greenavocado 3mo ago> why must it be a dramatic collapse? Extreme investor desire for return on capital investment, and quickly
- fhe 3mo agobecause, as Musk once said, always bet on the more interesting outcome (because we live in a simulation)
- glimshe 3mo agoGoogle at its peak, as well as Microsoft, had similarly strong teams.
- uejfiweun 3mo agoI'm starting to get the sense that Anthropic is the company that will fulfill the prophecy laid out in AI 2027.
- frays 3mo agoApart from Karpathy and now Shazeer and Jumper, who are the other top ICs in their team?
- gordonhart 3mo agoShazeer is joining OpenAI, adjust your fantasy frontier team draft picks accordingly
- SpyCoder77 3mo agoThe guy who invented jumping is joining a major AI lab?!?
- kridsdale1 3mo agoThe JMP assembly instruction is pretty important. Imagine if the inventor had royalties.
- abraxas 3mo agoSomething seems afoot at Google. The real tell will be if Demis makes a move. Jeff Dean seems more like a lifer to me.
- lachlanj 3mo agoMaybe 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.
- make3 3mo 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 3mo 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.
- WarmWash 3mo agoShazeer yesterday and Jumper today....Demis is there something we need to know about?
- make3 3mo 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.
- rvz 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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.
- aabhay 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo agoNominative determinism.
- angoragoats 3mo ago[flagged]
- incognito124 3mo agoOh he just won this tiny award named after Alfred Nobel
- angoragoats 3mo agoCool! I’d advocate for OP to put that in the headline, then.
- brcmthrowaway 3mo agoI would just join a lab for 4 years and retire at this point.
- jatins 3mo agoYou think these people don't already have generational wealth?
- brcmthrowaway 3mo agoBefore they joined the lab?
- HlessClaudesman 3mo agoJohn Jumper Jumps to Anthropic, was right there.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- OoTheNigerian 3mo agoDrop the "John" :)
- hsaliak 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo agoIt’s annoying that the headline gives no context of who Jumper is, as if everyone is expected to know.
- sidibe 3mo 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 3mo agoIt's Hacker News, a lot of people probably know. I didn't, but he has a Wikipedia page so whatever.
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- ProllyInfamous 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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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