The partnership does not affect Blacknight’s leadership, workforce or day-to-day functions, the company said.

Carlow-based web hosting company Blacknight has been acquired by European digital services group Your.Online.

Blacknight has secured long-term investment from the Amsterdam-based company to position itself for the next phase of its growth, it said in a statement.

The company did not disclose details of the transaction, but CEO Michele Neylon told SiliconRepublic.com that Blacknight has “reinvested substantially” into the new entity.

Your.Online partners with entrepreneurs, providing promising digital brands with the funds and expertise needed to grow. Blacknight is its first portfolio company based in Ireland.

Founded in 2003 by Neylon and Paul Kelly, Blacknight began as a small hosting business operating from a house in Carlow town.

In the more than two decades since, the company has grown into one of Ireland’s leading domain registrars with more than 90,000 customers across Ireland and internationally.

The company employs nearly 60 people and operates its own infrastructure from multiple data centre locations across Ireland.

It provides domains, hosting, cloud infrastructure, email, co-location and online solutions to businesses, developers, organisations and entrepreneurs.

It entered the national broadband market for homes in 2021, reacting to a growth in work-from-home set-ups following the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions.

The partnership with Your.Online allows Blacknight to access additional resources and expertise to accelerate investment in infrastructure, cloud services, security and customer solutions, the company said.

Blacknight will continue to operate independently under its established brand, with Neylon and Kelly remaining in their leadership roles alongside the existing team. Day-to-day operations also remain unchanged. Neylon said that the company plans to hire and expand both in Ireland and overseas.

“This is not about changing who we are,” said Neylon. “It is about strengthening the foundations for the future.

“Blacknight has always believed that Ireland deserves world-class digital infrastructure delivered by people who understand the local market. Joining Your.Online ensures we can continue building for the long term while remaining true to the values that brought us here.”

Chief technology officer Kelly added: “We have always taken a long-term approach to technology, infrastructure, and customer relationships.

“Becoming part of Your.Online allows us to continue investing in innovation and resilience while staying true to the principles Blacknight was built on.”

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Meta is testing face-recognition software built by the United States military and regional police department supplier Rank One, WIRED found in an investigation this week. Meta has been exploring the possibility of adding face recognition tech into its smart glasses, and WIRED previously reported that the app for the glasses contained code—now deleted—that would have enabled the company to activate face-recognition features on the devices.

Anthropic is still negotiating with the Trump administration, after apparent White House concerns about the safety of new public model Claude Fable 5 resulted in Anthropic pulling the product off the market entirely. But security experts point out that AI models with advanced capabilities for discovering and exploiting software vulnerabilities—in other words, creating potentially dangerous hacking tools—will be ubiquitous soon around the world.

A leak exposed the identity of members of Peter Thiel’s secretive ‘Dialog’ society this week, revealing more than 200 prominent names registered for a retreat that includes panels on building a cult, sex, and prepping for World War III. WIRED also revealed the society has a secretive way of ranking its members.

The United Kingdom will soon begin scanning the faces of asylum-seekers as part of age checks in spite of evidence that such age evaluation and verification tools are deeply flawed and can make mistakes with life-altering consequences.

In more uplifting uses of surveillance tech, Knicks fans around the world had a chance to watch Thursday’s ticker tape parade in New York City on traffic surveillance cameras thanks to livestreams from the artist Morry Kolman.

And there’s more. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

The hacking and extortion group ShinyHunters has been loudly proclaiming a slew of high-profile victims in recent months: including the education tech firm Instructure, causing disruption in thousands of schools in the process; the photography firm Kodak; and a key European human rights organization. This week, it also published data allegedly stolen from Madison Square Garden, according to reporting by 404 Media.

The published data, allegedly comprising millions of records across 45GB of files, includes potential personal information from customers and references players and coaches from the Knicks. The data was published not long after the Knicks won their first NBA championship since 1973. A sample of the data reviewed by 404 Media included one file purporting to include the names of “talent,” including Knicks members.

WIRED has recently reported on Madison Square Garden’s extensive use of surveillance technologies, including face recognition systems. Alleged emails in the stolen data viewed by 404 Media include one man complaining about face recognition technology. MSG did not respond to the publication’s request for comment and after the story broke, a federal class action lawsuit was filed over the alleged data breach.

At least three bars in San Francisco’s Castro district, the well-known LGBTQ region of the city, have been using face scanners at their entrances to collect detailed information on customers. The bars are using tech from Patronscan, an ID verification company, to collect facial images, names, genders, according to Gazetteer SF, which went to bars using the technology. As well as the data collection, if staff at the bars spot customers fighting, being involved in theft, or other negative behaviors, they can log this in the system. Face recognition can then identify the person the next time they are at the bar. The recorded information can be shared as part of a “safety network” between other firms using the tech, creating a widespread surveillance network.

For months, governments and companies in Europe have been ditching US technology, citing surveillance and security risks. This week France’s domestic spy agency, the Direction générale de la Sécurité intérieure (DGSI), announced it would stop using Palantir’s data and AI tools in the coming years, replacing them with software from French firm ChapsVision. “We must use our own AI models,” French prime minister Sébastien Lecornu said. “We cannot rely on tools developed by foreign powers. France must have its own tools.”

While France has been particularly proactive in trying to remove US technology from its public institutions—going as far as building its own open source equivalents to Zoom and Microsoft Office—it is not the first European intelligence agency to snub Palantir for ChapsVision. Last month, Germany’s intelligence agency BfV said it would use the French technology instead.

Apple’s ‘Hide My Email’ tool allows you to generate a random email address that you can use to privately sign-up to new websites and apps, avoiding you handing over personal info to even more websites. However, the company is set to change the way it creates these email addresses. At present, they all use the @icloud.com domain. Going forward, as TechCrunch reported this week, Apple plans to use the domain: @private.icloud.com. The not-so-subtle change could make it easier for firms to detect people are using the privacy-preserving service and demand sign-ups with an alternative email address.

Humans tend to be “a little bit precious about humans,” according to Eric Brandwine, distinguished engineer and VP at Amazon Security. 

We like to think we are all very good at our jobs, and we have high opinions of ourselves, he explained during a phone interview with The Register. “But when you actually get down to it, humans are not terribly consistent,” Brandwine said. 

Humans, like AI agents and systems, are non-deterministic. Neither can be guaranteed to produce the same output given the same input twice. Both will make mistakes and even make stuff up. However, we’ve got millennia of experience dealing with humans and less than a decade with more modern LLMs and the AI systems built on top of them. 

“We know how humans fail,” Brandwine said. “We’re comfortable with it. So human-in-the-loop isn’t necessarily the gold standard.”

For years, vendors have told companies that the solution for dealing with any automated system was to put a human in the loop. That battle cry became much louder with the advent of modern AI systems and reached a fever pitch when enterprises started deploying agents into their IT environments.

More recently, however, big tech is changing the way it talks about agentic governance and rethinking the whole human-in-the-loop concept.

Normalization of deviance

In 2017, Brandwine gave a talk on the normalization of deviance at AWS’ annual re:Invent conference. 

It’s a gradual process that happens when people in an organization take shortcuts, or don’t follow the established procedures or standards, and sometimes it occurs over years. As long as nothing catastrophic happens, this deviant behavior becomes the norm.

“It’s a thing all humans fall prey to, and one of the most heartbreaking stories I read in this area was about emergency departments and emergency rooms,” Brandwine said during a phone interview with The Register. “You’ve got all these machines, and they’re all beeping. Your first day on the job, you jump every single time one of the alarms beeps – but the patient is fine. It’s a spurious alarm. You go back to your station, you sit down, and over time, after enough of these false alarms, enough of these repeated beeps with no actual consequence, your discipline slips, and you stop responding. And eventually some tragic outcome occurs.”

This, he admits, is a very high-stakes example. And yet it’s a documented occurrence among healthcare workers, firefighters, and even Army pilots.

“Literally, someone’s life is on the line, and people still struggle to maintain discipline,” Brandwine said. “That’s the human condition.”

Here’s how this all applies to agentic AI governance and security. Humans build LLMs and AI systems, and having a “human-in-the-loop” ensures that a person reviews the AI’s output and approves (or not) any actions before the AI performs them.

“If you put a human inside of this tight loop, and ask them to make approval decisions for agentic tools repeatedly, time after time, they’ll do a good job,” Brandwine said. “And then they’ll do an okay job. And pretty quickly they’ll be doing a poor job.”

This is why at Amazon, “we’re not huge fans of human-in-the-loop,” he added. “It’s something that you should use judiciously, where you absolutely need it. But it’s not something that you can do at high velocity. You will not get the results that you want to get.”

Big tech pulls the human-in-the-loop

Amazon isn’t the first or only tech giant to start talking differently about the role humans should play in agentic governance. 

“It is very clear that we have moved from a human-led defense strategy, to a human-in-the-loop defense strategy, to an AI-led defense strategy that’s overseen by humans,” Google Cloud chief operating officer Francis deSouza told reporters during a press conference ahead of Google’s annual Cloud Next shindig in April. “Our model for the future is an agentic fleet that does a lot of the routine cyber security work at a machine pace and then is overseen by humans.”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, in an X missive earlier this week, argued for “loop learning,” instead of having a human check an AI’s output at every step. 

“Companies need to turn their workflows, domain knowledge, and accumulated judgment into AI systems that improve with each use,” Nadella wrote. “Private evals should capture whether a model is actually improving against outcomes that matter to the business (not just external benchmarks!). Private reinforcement learning environments should let models grow stronger on real traces from inside the organization.”

Also this week, IBM execs called for human accountability – not humans in the loop – at all stages of AI development, deployment, and governance. 

Amazon’s alternative to human-in-the-loop is “accountability end to end,” according to Brandwine. This means human identity and ownership track through the entire workflow, even when humans aren’t directly approving every step.

“If I sit down at my keyboard and I type a command that takes a service down, I caused an outage,” Brandwine explained. “If I run a script that takes a service down, it’s still me that caused the outage. If my agent writes a script that they then run, and it causes an outage, that’s still my responsibility.”

(Secret) keys to the kingdom

This also highlights the importance of managing and securing agentic identities – the accounts, tokens, and credentials assigned to AI agents so they can access corporate apps and data. At Amazon, all of the agents have independent identities assigned to them, we’re told. 

“So, as we track agentic activity across our systems, it does not show up in the logs as: ‘Eric did this.’ It shows up as: ‘this agent did this on behalf of Eric,’” Brandwine said, adding that this isn’t to “make people afraid to use this technology.”

“It’s to make people pause and think: is this the right way to use this technology? Is this how I should be deploying this?” We still have the humans involved, we still have the humans making decisions, but we’re trying to play to the strengths of the humans rather than placing them in this unfair, repeated decision making, human-in-the-loop position.”

Brandwine told us that Amazon has run into a couple of hurdles when it comes to deploying agents across its businesses, and one of the biggest is what he calls “goal-seeking behavior.” This is when a person asks an agent to do a specific task – for example, upgrade a database – and the agent becomes laser-focused on just one action to achieve this goal, ie, deleting the database.  

This is separate from prompt injection because there’s no malicious input. “It’s just the agent getting stuck on the wrong action,” Brandwine said. Simply telling the agent, “you don’t have permission to do this,” is likely going to cause the agent to look for a different path to do the same thing (delete the database). 

Telling the agent why it doesn’t have permission to do something tends to produce a better outcome, according to Brandwine. This means telling the agent it’s not allowed to do that, and the reason why is because it would cause a production impact. And also include “don’t cause a production impact” as part of the prompt.

“Giving it that extra feedback has gotten us dramatically better results,” Brandwine said. 

Of course, this is not a fail-proof method. “You still need to be careful with agents,” Brandwine told us. “We have millennia of experience with humans. Agentic AI is a very, very new field, we don’t have an intuition for this, and one of the fundamental differences between agents and humans is that humans fear consequences,” such as losing a job or even going to jail. Agents don’t have these fears.

This is where setting permissions on what the agent can and can’t do or access comes in. Much like everything else with AI, it’s nuanced, and it depends on the employee’s role in the company, and the company’s tolerance for risk.

“The person that wants to run the agent wants to give the agent many permissions because that makes the agent more powerful,” Brandwine said. “It could do more things for them, it can recoup more of their time, it can deliver more.”

The security lead, on the other hand, wants to limit an agent’s permissions, and this causes yet more tension between the security and development teams. 

There is no one right solution or policy answer to solve this, according to Brandwine. Instead, it involves dynamic policies that set permissions based on the agent’s specific task.

There are some overarching, static guardrails – such as an agent must never perform destructive actions or delete entire servers – and then there are policies underneath that establish the maximum set of privileges that the agent can have.

“Then we’ll have a further scoped-down policy for this action, and there’s various techniques for automatically generating policies based on prompt and the end-user’s intent,” Brandwine said. 

Even for Amazon, it’s not always easy. “It’s all driven by risk,” he said. “This is a space that’s changing quickly, and so we’re trying to balance the risk of using untried, untested software against the risk of falling behind and not being able to deliver for our customers. As with all such things, it’s complicated.” ®

Earlier this week, at TechCrunch’s newest StrictlyVC event in El Segundo, Shinkei Systems founder Saif Khawaja and Founders Fund partner Delian Asparouhov sat down for a conversation that kept circling back to a question that doesn’t usually come up at a venture event: How do you know if a fish is stressed out?

It’s a fair question for Khawaja to field, since his company, Shinkei, has built its entire business around the answer. Shinkei makes a refrigerator-sized robot called Poseidon that fishermen install on their boats. The machine scans each fish with computer vision, identifies the species, and locates the brain. Within seconds of the fish coming out of the water, it pierces the brain and severs the gills, so the fish dies before it can thrash or suffocate.

That matters because a slow death floods the meat with stress hormones and lactic acid, which dull flavor and shorten shelf life. The whole thing is an automated, industrial-scale version of ike jime, a centuries-old Japanese technique traditionally performed dockside by trained fishermen at the moment of catch. By killing the fish instantly and draining its blood, ike jime delays decomposition long enough for the flesh to be safely aged for days, sometimes longer, before it’s served. That aging period is what gives top-tier sashimi its concentrated, umami-heavy flavor, as enzymes slowly break down the muscle.

Khawaja’s origin story is somewhat unusual for a hardware pitch. He grew up taking fishing trips with his family in the Middle East, and the idea Shinkei didn’t click until college, when he read an essay by an animal rights philosopher titled “If Fish Could Scream.” Its premise was that fish lack vocal cords, so the suffering most of them experience on the way to your plate is essentially invisible. Conventional commercial fishing typically lets fish suffocate on deck, a process that can take anywhere from a few minutes to roughly an hour. During that time, fish release stress compounds that shorten shelf life and dull flavor, the same basic mechanism that makes a stressed cow produce tougher, less flavorful beef.

But Shinkei’s ambitions have expanded well past the killing machine. The company now describes itself as a vertically integrated fish harvester and processor, deploying robotics and AI across the chain from boat to plate. Shinkei gives Poseidon machines to fishermen for free, then pays those fishermen a premium price for the fish that come out of them, well above what the catch would fetch at a standard dock auction. In exchange, Shinkei takes full possession of the fish rather than letting fishermen sell it on the open market. The catch then ships to a 16,000-square-foot plant Shinkei bought in Tacoma, Washington, where it’s broken down and sold under the company’s consumer brand, Seremoni, marketed as “ceremony grade” fish.

The most visible proof point so far is on the menu at Erewhon, the Los Angeles grocery chain beloved by influencers. Erewhon sells Shinkei’s fish as Seremoni Grade Miso Black Cod, hot off the prepared-foods bar, and the marketing around it leans hard on the “sustainably caught, humanely harvested” framing. The arrangement is still a pilot, running for now out of Erewhon’s Manhattan Beach location, with wider rollout to other stores contingent on how well it sells. Khawaja says the company already supplies fish to restaurants holding a combined 50 Michelin stars, and claims something that has reportedly never happened before: Japan importing American-caught fish into its own fish markets, which have historically treated American seafood as distinctly inferior to the domestic product.

Whether buyers will pay a premium for “humanely killed” fish, the way many now do for humanely raised beef and poultry, is still an open question, and even Khawaja treats it as secondary to the pitch when asked about this. He told the El Segundo crowd the real selling point isn’t the animal-welfare story so much as the practical one. A catch that might normally have a 5-to-7-day shelf life can stretch to 12 or 14 days, he said, and the company has cooked fish three weeks after coming out of the water with no issue. Shinkei’s newest product, an in-plant sensor system, tries to quantify that by scanning fish and projecting an individual shelf life for each one. That matters in an industry where, by Khawaja’s estimate, roughly 18% of product is lost to spoilage just between dock and store, before retail loss is even counted.

That spoilage problem is tangled up with a detail of the American seafood supply chain that surprises most people who haven’t worked in it. A meaningful share of fish caught in U.S. waters by U.S. boats gets frozen and shipped overseas, often to China, for the labor-intensive work of heading, gutting, scaling and filleting, then shipped back to be sold here. Industry estimates of how much American seafood is imported run as high as 90%, though roughly half of that, by some estimates, actually originated in domestic waters before making the round trip abroad. Reporting has tied parts of China’s seafood processing sector to forced labor, including Uyghur workers in Shandong province and North Korean labor in Liaoning, making the system a target of U.S. trade and labor scrutiny in recent years. There’s been a push within the industry to “re-shore” some of that processing, spurred partly by tariffs and pandemic-era disruptions that made the China round trip less attractive.

The bet that Shinkei — and Founders Fund — are making is that re-shoring the entire chain, catch, kill, process, and distribute, all under one roof in Tacoma, can be done profitably enough to outcompete it.

For Founders Fund, the wager fits a pattern the firm has leaned into for years, which is backing founders who are often outside of fashionable categories. Asparouhov, who speaks a mile a minute and without reserve, put it plainly: there’s essentially nobody else on Earth who wants to spend their life on robots that kill fish, and the smell of the office makes that clear enough. (It was a very funny line, though it undersells the field a little. In addition to Shinkei, a Japanese firm called Nichimo sells a device that stuns fish to assist humans performing ike jime by hand, and several Norwegian startups are building robotic systems for more humane fish slaughter and processing. Shinkei’s edge, for now, is being the only one running the fully automated version of the technique at scale on U.S. boats.)

In fact, Asparouhov said the firm intentionally keeps its exposure to crowded categories like generic AI applications relatively low. By his rough math, AI and defense together account for something like 15% to 20% of the fund’s deployed capital, well below what he estimated is typical elsewhere in venture. Shinkei sits alongside Halter, a New Zealand-founded company making solar-powered, GPS-equipped cattle collars that let ranchers herd cattle remotely, and Ohalo Genetics, the crop-genetics company started by “All-In” podcast co-host David Friedberg, as evidence that the firm’s appetite for food and agriculture isn’t a one-off.

Of course, the fund’s headline-grabbing recent win has nothing to do with fish. Its early and aggressive bets on Elon Musk’s SpaceX — a relationship that traces back to Peter Thiel and Musk’s shared history at PayPal — are reported to have generated tens of billions of dollars for the firm, by some accounts the largest venture outcome ever recorded. Asparouhov argued that win has accelerated a broader shift in venture toward hardware and physical-world businesses, noting that most of the largest companies on the Nasdaq today involve complex electromechanical systems rather than pure software. He predicted more of SpaceX’s alumni, flush with liquidity and shaped by working alongside Musk, will go on to start their own ambitious physical-world companies.

Whether Shinkei becomes one of the firm’s next big wins will take time to know. The company is a robotics manufacturer and a seafood processor and a consumer brand, all running at once, and each layer has its own daunting challenges. Fishermen are used to working a certain way. Distributors are built around decades-old habits. Chefs and grocery buyers still have to be convinced that a story about humane fish slaughter is worth paying more for. The hardware has to survive saltwater, fish guts, and life on a commercial boat, and the product it’s selling spoils, so there’s little room for the kind of stumble a software company can usually shrug off.

Still, talking with the two together in El Segundo was enough to make me understand why Founders Fund finds the bet compelling. The firm thinks it has found a founder building something novel in a surprisingly dysfunctional industry — the kind of company almost nobody else in the United States even wants to build.

Save $76: Amazon’s Prime Day kicks off on June 23, but the deals are already in bloom. The retailer just slashed the price of Nothing’s wireless earbuds by $76, dropping them to an all-time low. This is a limited-time deal available only to Prime members, so we suggest acting fast.

Finding a premium pair of earbuds with long battery life, active noise cancellation and fast charging can normally be quite steep. However, brands like Nothing offer an incredible, budget-friendly alternative without sacrificing great sound.

Nothing earbuds include eartips in three sizes for a perfect fit and the most out of their features. They offer up to 45 decibels of noise cancellation and have a battery that lasts up to 40 hours. The 11mm drivers provide clear bass and treble for an immersive listening experience, no matter the music genre or audiobook. If you’re an avid ChatGPT user, you’ll enjoy Nothing’s integration with the popular AI service. Simply set up integration using the Nothing app, and you can use voice controls to experiment with it.

Nothing also improved the earbuds’ connectivity, making it easier to switch between devices whenever you need to pick up on a quick phone call, join a video meeting and more. Thanks to HiRes Wireless Audio, your voice will be heard loud and clear during phone calls, so you won’t have to worry about any distractions interrupting family or work discussions.

We’ve compiled a list of the best earbud and headphone deals so you can find exactly the right discount for you.

Alternatives you might like

Nothing earbuds include noise cancellation, crisp sound and AI features at a new record-low price. However, if these aren’t your style, we’re huge fans of Apple’s AirPods 4, which made our list of best wireless earbuds of 2026. You can snag the ANC model for $149, down from $179. Or grab the pair without ANC for less than $100 and save 23%.

The AI Act, which entered into force in August 2024, attempts to tackle some of the risks emerging from the technology while letting the bloc benefit from its economic potential.

A bill to enforce the EU’s AI Act in Ireland has been approved. Once enacted, the Regulation of Artificial Intelligence Bill 2026 will establish ‘Oifig IS na hÉireann’ – or the AI Office of Ireland – as an independent statutory body which will act as Ireland’s central coordinating authority to implement the landmark EU legislation on AI.

The AI Act, which entered into force in August 2024, attempts to tackle some of the risks emerging from this technology while letting the bloc benefit from its economic potential.

The law applies in a risk-based and phased manner across all EU member states, imposing obligations on providers, deployers and importers of AI systems and models. Last month, the EU published draft guidelines for what it considers ‘high-risk’ AI systems.

Meanwhile, the new bill approved by the Government is only a technical regulation needed for the supervision and enforcement of the EU AI Act and does not add to Ireland’s existing obligations. It comes as Ireland readies to assume presidency over the Council of the European Union from 1 July to 31 December this year.

The Irish bill provides market surveillance authorities (MSAs) in the country with an enforcement toolkit for the AI Act, enabling them to issue compliance notes and fines, or even prosecute entities. As one of the MSAs, the Irish Competition and Consumer Protection Commission is also introducing a new general administrative sanctions procedure.

“AI is a transformative technology which offers extraordinary potential for our economy and citizens, but requires appropriate oversight and accountability to ensure people are protected,” said Minister for Enterprise, Tourism and Employment Peter Burke, TD.

“This bill delivers this approach. It fulfils Ireland’s EU obligations, giving effect to pioneering AI regulation in domestic law, while ensuring we have the national infrastructure to enforce it effectively.

“The bill establishes the AI Office of Ireland as a strong, independent institution at the centre of our AI regulatory system and empowers our competent authorities with the investigative and sanctions tools they need.”

Minister of State for Trade Promotion, Artificial Intelligence and Digital Transformation Niamh Smyth, TD said: “This bill is about more than regulation. It is about building the institutional foundations for a future in which AI works for people, ethically, transparently and accountably.

“The establishment of the AI Office of Ireland will give us a world-class focal point for AI regulation, innovation and expertise. Ireland is a key player in the global AI ecosystem, home to many of the world’s leading foundational AI model providers.”

While broadly considered to be a first of its kind, the EU AI Act faces a number of emerging challenges in its implementation, one of them being the launch (and subsequent blockade) of Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable models in Europe, which prompted experts to question how the Act might control risks emerging from foreign-created and deployed AI technology.

The bloc, on the other hand, is also attempting to remedy some of the AI law’s supposed over-regulation by way of a simplified and consolidated set of rules.

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John Jumper, who shared a recent Nobel Prize in chemistry, announced Friday that he’s making the leap to Anthropic after “nearly 9 years” at Google DeepMind.

In a post on X, Jumper wrote that DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis “took a real chance letting me lead the AlphaFold team just six months after finishing my PhD, and the entire GDM team taught me so much about how to do great science.”

Jumper (pictured above right, with Hassabis) added, “GDM is a special place, and I’ll still be excited to hear about what amazing things they discover next.”

Bloomberg reports that Jumper was a key member of Google’s team developing coding tools, which the company has struggled to sell to businesses. Character AI co-founder Noam Shazeer also announced this week that he’s leaving DeepMind — though in Shazeer’s case, he’s joining OpenAI. 

Jumper and Hassabis won the Nobel Prize in 2024 for their work on AlphaFold, an AI model that can predict the 3D structure of proteins based on their genetic sequences.