It's Monday, June 22nd: Google lost the co-author of the transformer paper and a Nobel laureate to its two biggest rivals in 48 hours, while a Chinese lab claimed it will reach Claude-class AI before Q1 2027.
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1️⃣ POACHED: Google Loses Its Transformer Pioneer And A Nobel Laureate In 48 Hours
Image from Silicon Republic
In just two days, Google lost both a co-author of the transformer paper that underpins modern AI and its Nobel-winning AlphaFold scientist, one leaving for OpenAI and the other for Anthropic.
On June 18, Noam Shazeer, Google's VP of engineering and a co-lead of Gemini, said on X he is joining OpenAI to lead research on AI architecture, the design of the models themselves.
John Jumper, who led AlphaFold at Google DeepMind for nearly nine years and shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, announced he too is leaving, joining Anthropic.
Google paid a reported $2.7 billion less than two years ago in the Character.AI deal that brought Shazeer and part of his team back, and he co-wrote the 2017 "Attention Is All You Need" paper behind nearly every large language model today.
The losses hit Google's Gemini and DeepMind science teams, which now face leadership gaps in two areas Google has spent years and billions defending. Watch whether more senior researchers follow, since two high-profile exits in 48 hours can signal a retention problem one counteroffer will not fix.
2️⃣ FRONTIER RACE: A Chinese Lab Tells Musk It Will Match Claude Sooner Than He Thinks
Image from Office Chai
Z.ai founder Jie Tang told Elon Musk on X that China will reach Claude Fable 5-class AI before Q1 2027, days after his lab shipped a leading open-weight model.
The exchange landed days after Washington walled off the frontier: on June 12, the Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to cut all foreign access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5, including its own non-citizen employees, citing a jailbreak it deemed a national-security risk. The same week, Z.ai shipped GLM-5.2 under an MIT license it markets as having "no regional limits."
The exchange began when an X user asked Tang how long China needed to match "Fable class." Musk guessed the first quarter of 2027; Tang replied it won't take that long, suggesting it will happen even sooner.
GLM-5.2's weights are released under an MIT license on Hugging Face, and Z.ai's own published benchmarks put it ahead of OpenAI's GPT-5.5 on coding tests like SWE-bench Pro, though GPT-5.5 still leads on several others.
Teams picking a model stack now have an MIT-licensed option that Z.ai's own benchmarks put near several closed frontier models, with permissive licensing for self-hosting and commercial use. Watch whether Z.ai's next model actually closes the gap to Fable 5, because if Tang's timeline holds, open weights could stop trailing the frontier and start pressuring its price.
📰 Other Headlines
SEOUL EXPANSION: Anthropic opened a Seoul office and put Claude into production at NAVER, Samsung SDS, LG CNS, Nexon, and Hanwha, alongside an MOU with Korea's science ministry.
CHATGPT UPDATES: OpenAI gave ChatGPT pronunciation coaching in 60+ languages, World Cup updates at chatgpt.com/football, and per-app permission controls for connected apps.
CODEX LEARNS BY WATCHING: OpenAI added Record and Replay to the Codex Mac app, so you demonstrate a workflow once and it becomes a reusable skill.
GROK ON BEDROCK: xAI's Grok 4.3 is now generally available on Amazon Bedrock, bringing its 1-million-token context window to AWS.
COWORK GOES LIVE: Microsoft made Copilot Cowork generally available worldwide, running long agentic tasks in the cloud on usage-based credits, with more than half the Fortune 500 already in the preview.
WORLD MODELS FUNDED: World-model startup Odyssey raised a $310M Series B at a $1.45B valuation led by Natural Capital, with Amazon, AMD Ventures, and GV joining.
INDIA'S NEW UNICORN: Sarvam became India's newest AI unicorn with a $234M round at a $1.5B valuation led by HCLTech, funding Indian-language foundation models.
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