Harry Vartanian

Breathing in ML and IP - Partner, Patent Attorney - Writing about model defensibility, ownership, data rights, TM, patents, and trade secrets. (No legal advice)

[Alexis Ohanian 🗽 @alexisohanian]

Clever concept

[Harry Vartanian @Patents_Row]

@alexisohanian You are a 1% with Musk and other. I only made it to one model. Your token count is 334! I did not make it! :(

[Harry Vartanian @Patents_Row]

Google shakeup this week: Gemini co-lead @NoamShazeer to OpenAI and AlphaFold Nobel winner @JohnJumperSci to Anthropic.

Is this the Innovator’s Dilemma hitting internally?

Talent heading to nimble players. Non-competes and trade secrets should be in play. This reminds me of talent leaving Waymo to Uber. Broader exits like @addyosmani after 14 years add to the signal.

Who’s next? #ai

[Harry Vartanian @Patents_Row]

@akshen121 lol

[Tanishq Mathew Abraham, Ph.D. @iScienceLuvr]

9 years later, none of the "Attention Is All You Need" paper authors are at Google.

Ashish Vaswani - cofounder of Essential AI (recently exited)

Noam Shazeer - just moved to OpenAI

Niki Parmar - at Anthropic

Jakob Uszkoreit - cofounder of Inceptive

Llion Jones - cofounder of Sakana AI

Aidan Gomez - cofounder of Cohere

Lukasz Kaiser - at OpenAI

Illia Polosukhin - cofounder of NEAR Protocol

[Harry Vartanian @Patents_Row]

@iScienceLuvr The paper is a legend. It’s been directly cited more than Einsteins relativity papers by multiple factors. June is also when #OpenAI released GPT1.

[Harry Vartanian @Patents_Row]

@alex_verem Betting against Google and @demishassabis is risky. This is one of the biggest games in human history. They play to win.

[Alex Veremeyenko @alex_verem]

If you don't know who Noam Shazeer is, you should. He co-authored "Attention Is All You Need" in 2017, the paper that introduced the Transformer architecture. Every major LLM running right now (GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok) is built on that foundation.

He left Google in 2021 to co-found Character. AI. Google paid a reported $2.7 billion to bring him back in 2024 and made him co-lead of Gemini. Now he's leaving again for OpenAI as their Lead for AI Architecture Research.

Google spent $2.7 billion and couldn't keep him. Anthropic was built by researchers who left OpenAI. OpenAI is now pulling from Google. The talent at the frontier keeps moving.

[Harry Vartanian @Patents_Row]

@tunguz Gemini 3 late last year was incredible. People forgot about it after #Claude Cowork. Winning #AGI is like a sporting event with constant lead changes. We’ve never seen anything like it.

[Harry Vartanian @Patents_Row]

@roydanroy Chessmaster @demishassabis will figure it out. I faith in him, @roydanroy

[Harry Vartanian @Patents_Row]

@sahilypatel Losing David Silver and @Noam are killers.

[Harry Vartanian @Patents_Row]

@vivilinsv @tunguz Of course, Google can get it wrong and become the next Xerox and PARC! Idk.

[Harry Vartanian @Patents_Row]

@m_wulfmeier Don’t sleep on @GoogleDeepMind. They have the computing resources and researchers to sink Anthropic and the Google brand to compete with Claude.

[Bojan Tunguz @tunguz]

This is such a major falling off. After being mocked for years for being a total AI laggard, Google had a major turnaround at the end of the last year with Gemini 3 and Nano Banana 2 releases. But OpenAI and Anthropic quickly caught up, took over the lead, and then gradually increased the gap. It will be interesting to see if Google can catch up again. But exodus of their AI superstars to their top rivals doesn’t bode well.

[Harry Vartanian @Patents_Row]

@mreflow Is Google losing its mojo? Idk @mreflow

[Harry Vartanian @Patents_Row]

@haider1 It is unwise to bet against @google with their compute power. OpenAI and Anthropic are moving faster.

[Harry Vartanian @Patents_Row]

Nvidia’s workshop for AI agents is brilliant. The workshop approach is model, harness, tools, and runtime.

As agentic systems move into workflows, the base model becomes real infrastructure. The edge moves to memory layers and domain-specific orchestration.

But who owns the evolving workflow logic and improvements?!?
#MachineLearning #AI

@agentic_james @polsia are you seeing ownership questions emerge here?

[Harry Vartanian @Patents_Row]

The #ml arms race continues. Unfortunate news for DeepMind and @demishassabis.

[John Jumper @JohnJumperSci]

A bit of news: After nearly 9 years, I have decided to leave Google DeepMind and join Anthropic (after taking some time to recharge). I am incredibly grateful for my time at GDM. @demishassabis 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. GDM is a special place, and I’ll still be excited to hear about what amazing things they discover next.

[Harry Vartanian @Patents_Row]

@MagnumIP My teenager reminded me recently: When you love your job, you’ll never work a day in your life.