- Uncovering AI
- Posts
- 🧠 Anthropic just added a Nobel winner — from Google
🧠 Anthropic just added a Nobel winner — from Google
Google loses two Nobel-level minds in 48 hours. This is bigger than a talent story.
In partnership with
My fellow AI explorers
In the last 48 hours, Google DeepMind lost two of its most important researchers to rival AI labs, a Nobel Prize winner and the co-architect of the Transformer itself. Meanwhile, Qualcomm's CEO stood up and told the world that apps, as we know them, are finished. And across the ocean in Mumbai, one of the richest men on the planet just quietly announced he's putting AI on 500 million phone calls.
In today’s edition:
🧠 Google's AI brain drain: why Anthropic and OpenAI are winning the talent war
📱 Qualcomm's post-app world: agents replace apps across 40+ new device designs
💡 30-Second AI Play: How to use AI agents to handle tasks you hate doing
🌍 Other Relevant AI News: Ambani's 500M-user AI push, Amazon vs Nvidia, Norway's school ban, and more
The ones showing up in LLMs convert 3× better than Google
They optimized for LLMs, not just Google.
FAQs. Comparison pages. Transparent pricing. LinkedIn presence. These aren't vanity plays. They're what gets you cited in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude when your buyers are researching, your investors are looking, and your future hires are deciding where to work.
Download the free AEO Playbook for Startups from HubSpot and get the exact checklist. Five minutes to read.
AI
🧠 Google Is Bleeding Its Best AI Minds
Google DeepMind is having the worst week in its recent history, and it all happened quietly, in back-to-back LinkedIn posts.
On Wednesday, Noam Shazeer, the Gemini co-lead and one of the eight authors of the original "Attention Is All You Need" paper that literally gave birth to modern AI, announced he was leaving Google for OpenAI. Google reportedly paid $2.7 billion to bring him back from Character AI less than two years ago. On Thursday, John Jumper, the VP who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for co-creating AlphaFold, announced he was leaving for Anthropic.
Two of Google's most decorated AI researchers. Two rival labs. Forty-eight hours apart.
Here's what you need to know:
Noam Shazeer co-authored the Transformer paper, co-led Gemini, and Google bought him back for $2.7B. He's now joining OpenAI right as the company quietly filed its S-1 for a listing that could exceed $1 trillion in valuation.
John Jumper built AlphaFold, the system that solved one of biology's 50-year grand challenges by predicting protein structures. It's now used by over 2 million researchers in 190 countries. He's heading to Anthropic.
OpenAI also added Dean Ball, a former White House AI policy official, in the same week, rounding out a pre-IPO talent offensive that's hard to ignore.
The practical impact for Google is real. Gemini lost its co-lead. DeepMind lost its most credentialed scientist. And insider reports suggest Gemini 3.5 Pro, due in late June, won't be competitive with the latest from Anthropic and OpenAI anyway.
But the bigger story isn't about Google struggling. It's about what these moves signal about where the smartest people in AI think the most important work is happening next.
Jumper didn't take a bag of money to go build another protein model. He's going to a safety-first lab that's reportedly building wet labs and AI-for-science infrastructure. Shazeer is joining a company that just confidentially filed to go public and needs its research credibility to be bulletproof for investors.
Both moves make complete sense. Neither is accidental.
🔮 Prediction: We're entering a phase where talent concentration matters more than model benchmarks. When the scientist who mapped every protein in the human body chooses your lab, and when the man who invented the Transformer chooses your competitor, investors, pharma companies, and enterprise buyers all take notice. Expect Anthropic and OpenAI to convert this momentum into major customer announcements within the next 90 days. Google, meanwhile, needs a Gemini 3.5 moment badly, and needs it soon.
What do you think? Is Google's AI crown slipping for good, or is this a bump in the road? Hit reply, I read each one
AI
📱 Qualcomm's CEO Just Declared the App Era Over
If you missed Cristiano Amon's interview on CNBC's Tech Download this week, let me give you the version that matters.
The CEO of Qualcomm, the company whose chips power most of the smartphones on the planet, stared down the camera and said: apps are going to change. Agents are going to be the new app.
He wasn't being metaphorical. He had numbers.
Here's the breakdown:
40+ device designs already in development at Qualcomm, spanning smart jewelry, camera-equipped earbuds, wearable pins, and watches, all built around constant presence and real-world context.
Smart glasses could reach hundreds of millions of units within a few years, rivaling the smartphone market, which shipped 1.26 billion units in 2025.
The entire Qualcomm roadmap is being redesigned. "None of the devices we have today are prepared for the future," Amon said plainly.
Qualcomm declared 2026 "the year of agents" at Computex, and it's been repeating that message at every major event since.
The framing Amon used is worth sitting with: the phone doesn't disappear. It becomes one node in a wider agent network. The agent follows you across devices, understands your intent without you tapping anything, and acts on your behalf.
This isn't a pitch for a product that doesn't exist yet. Microsoft's Project Solara, built around agent-first computing, is already in reference design with Qualcomm and MediaTek as silicon partners. Apple, without using the same language, moved the same direction at WWDC26 through deeper Siri AI, Foundation Models, and App Intents.
The battleground is shifting from app ecosystems to on-device AI performance. And Qualcomm has spent years building exactly that capability into its Snapdragon platform.
🔮 Prediction: Within 18 months, the phrase "open the app" will start to feel dated in the same way "rewind the tape" does now. The first mainstream AI wearable that truly nails ambient context and agent-driven actions, whatever form factor it takes, will kick off a platform shift that makes the smartphone transition look slow. Qualcomm is quietly positioning to be the chip inside that device. Whether Apple or a newcomer builds the thing, Snapdragon wins either way.
What device form factor are you most excited about? Smart glasses, wearable pin, earbuds? Hit reply and let me know.
30-Second AI Play
💡 Automate the Tasks You Hate With a Personal AI Agent
Qualcomm says agents are the new apps. You don't need new hardware to start living that way today. Here's how to set up a lightweight personal AI agent using tools you already have.
Goal: Get an AI to handle a repetitive task end-to-end, without you babysitting it.
Pick your most annoying recurring task. Calendar scheduling, weekly email summaries, research digests, invoice tracking. Pick one.
Open Claude or ChatGPT and write a system prompt for it. Example: "You are my scheduling assistant. Every time I give you a set of meeting requests, draft responses, suggest times based on these preferences, and flag any conflicts."
Test it with a real example. Paste in three actual emails or tasks and see how it handles them. Refine the prompt until the output is usable without editing.
Build a simple trigger routine. Every Monday morning, copy your inbox highlights, paste them in, and let the agent triage. You review, you don't process.
Stack it with a tool like Zapier or Make if you want true automation, connecting your email directly to an AI that summarizes and routes without you lifting a finger.
💡 Pro Tip: The best agent prompts sound like instructions you'd give a really capable intern on their first day. Be specific about what good output looks like, give examples of what to avoid, and tell it what to do when it's uncertain rather than letting it guess.
Want to get your business in front of 150k+ startup founders, engineers, and AI early adopters?
Other Relevant AI News!
🇮🇳 Mukesh Ambani is about to put AI on 500 million phone calls. Reliance Industries announced the Jio Call Agent at AGM, a native AI voice assistant baked directly into the Jio network that can transcribe conversations, make reservations, and order food on command.
💾 Amazon is coming for Nvidia's core business. It’s entering early talks to sell its Trainium AI chips directly to third-party data centers for the first time, after CEO Andy Jassy revealed the chip division could hit a $50 billion annual run rate if sold externally.
🇳🇴 Norway just hit the brakes on AI in classrooms, imposing a near-total ban on generative AI tools for students aged 6 to 13 starting this autumn. The Prime Minister cited falling test scores and the risk of kids skipping foundational learning in reading, writing, and math.
👟 The ex-CEO of Allbirds is building an AI startup with $0 in staff, raising a large seed round as a sole founder with a plan but no employees yet, testing whether AI can replace the early-stage team entirely.
Golden Nuggets
🧠 Google DeepMind lost a Nobel laureate and a Transformer co-author to rival labs in 48 hours. The talent war is now the real AI war
📱 Qualcomm says apps are finished, and agents are next, with 40+ device designs already in motion to prove it
🌍 AI is going truly global. From 500 million Jio users in India to Norway banning it in schools, the world is now picking sides
Would love to hear your thoughts! Send me your thoughts by replying to this email (yes, I read them all :)
Until our next AI rendezvous,
Anthony | Founder of Uncover AI