Google DeepMind has lost six named researchers to Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic since February, with the quietest exit arguably the most significant, reasoning pioneer Denny Zhou, who left for Meta roughly four months ago with no announcement, his move visible only as a changed LinkedIn title. Zhou founded Google Brain’s reasoning team and developed chain-of-thought, self-consistency, and least-to-most prompting, methods now embedded in how major labs’ models handle hard problems. Gemini and AlphaFold researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel joined Anthropic alongside Nobel laureate John Jumper, while Dawn Song went to Meta, after Noam Shazeer’s jump to OpenAI. Reporting ties the exodus to a priority shift, as Google concentrates compute on coding and reportedly deprioritizes world-models work many see as the likelier path to AGI.
