In the AI talent wars, venture capitalist Jason Lemkin said on a recent episode of the "20VC" podcast that companies should offer top researchers the ability to work on problems they care about with fewer constraints, as "money isn't everything." Lemkin noted that Google, which acquired DeepMind in 2014, "created an environment where the best researchers in the world wanted to be there." However, this month, two high-profile AI researchers left the company: Noam Shazeer, a co-lead of Gemini, left Google to join OpenAI, and Google DeepMind's John Jumper, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on AlphaFold, left for Anthropic. Lemkin suggested the departures may reflect "the realities of having to try to be No. 1 in AI," as Google faces pressure to ship new products, potentially threatening the freewheeling research environment. He added that Anthropic and OpenAI may now be better able to offer the freedom to focus on the biggest AI questions.