Tillman's Software Monday Morning Missives

Research evidence excerpt

Tillman's Software Monday Morning Missives

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✓ Sector Update High-Profile AI Talent. We continue to see a major talent acquisition shift with highly

✓ Sector Read-Throughs experienced software and AI talent leaving established technology leaders, including

many AI/hyperscalers, to join leading frontier labs and other AI-focused disruptors.

With the sheer size of agentic AI opportunities and potentially highly lucrative career

opportunities, especially if current momentum can be maintained by leading LLM and

AI disruptors, we believe this AI transfer portal dynamic could continue apace while

potentially creating a talent deficit for technology and SaaS incumbents.

This past week, leading AI pioneer, Noam Shazeer, announced his departure from

Google (Alphabet, GOOGL, Buy, Squali) to join OpenAI (Private). He is credited with

publishing influential research papers on the potential for AI back in 2017 and well before

the industry for generative and agentic AI innovations took off. He is credited as the

inventor of the Transformer (the underlying architecture for many AI language models

today) and Mixture of Experts, and his formal title at Google was VP of Engineering

at Google and co-lead of Gemini LLMs. Mr. Shazeer had originally joined Google as a

software engineer in 2000 and was away from the business for close to a three-year

period to run Character.AI before him and some of his research team were acquired by

Google for a reported $2.7 billion in August 2024.

In other AI transfer portal news, and also related to a Google DeepMind defection, John

Jumper, a scientist who had previously won a Nobel Prize has left the company to

join Anthropic (Private). Mr. Jumper previously received accolades including the Nobel