AXIOS (Ina Fried) - Google takes the hit in AI's talent war
Google DeepMind lost two high-profile researchers in a week marked by a flurry of departures across major AI labs. Why it matters: The talent wars continue and have intensified at the highest levels as many AI developers believe that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is on the horizon. Driving the news: Noam Shazeer announced last week that he was leaving Google DeepMind for OpenAI. Google previously paid more than $2 billion to acqui-hire Shazeer and part of his Character.ai team. - Shazeer co-authored the pivotal 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the Transformer architecture — the "T" in ChatGPT. - Two days later, John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold, said he was also…