Four top researchers leave Google DeepMind for Anthropic and OpenAI in a matter of days

Losing the people who invented your core technology to the companies you are racing is about as bad a signal as a research lab can send. The pull is not just money, it is the sense that the interesting work and the pre-IPO upside now live somewhere else. Google still has enormous resources, but momentum in AI is made of people, and right now the people are voting with their feet.