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Applied AI·June 19, 2026·1 min read

John Jumper, who won the Nobel Prize "for protein structure prediction", says he is leaving Google DeepMind after nearly nine years to join Anthropic (John Jumper/@johnjumpersci)

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A Nobel-level protein-structure leader moving from DeepMind to Anthropic is another data point that frontier labs are competing not just on models, but on who can attract domain-heavy scientists for applied work. If you’re in AI-for-science or biotech, assume talent gravity is shifting toward labs with both frontier models and clear safety/compliance narratives—and calibrate your hiring and partnership strategy accordingly.

Applied AI

An interview with Smartbird CEO Nadia Carlsten about the shoe company Allbirds becoming an AI infrastructure company, plans to deploy compute clusters, and more (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch)

A consumer brand pivoting into AI infrastructure is less about fashion and more about how commoditized GPUs and colocation are lowering the bar to call yourself an "AI infra" player. For operators, the signal is that capital and narrative are chasing compute — if you’re not natively infra, be careful confusing opportunistic cluster deployment with a durable moat.

Applied AI

'This might actually force some actual brain cells to fire': Norway is banning younger school kids from using generative AI

Norway’s move to ban generative AI for younger students is an early example of hard regulatory ceilings on AI exposure in core public services. If you sell into education or youth-facing products, assume regional fragmentation in what’s allowed and design your roadmap and compliance stack for per-country policy toggles, not a single global default.

Applied AI

The big TechRadar Entertainment interview: Toy Story 5 VFX supervisor Thomas Jordan talks new toy designs, Easter eggs, Bonnie and Blaze, and Pixar's experiments with AI

Pixar experimenting with AI in Toy Story 5’s VFX pipeline shows that even top-tier studios are probing where generative tools can augment, not replace, artists. If you build creative tools, the bar is now "fit into an existing high-end workflow and preserve creative control," not "automate the whole stack."