Two prominent AI researchers jumping ship to competitors within days of each other sent Alphabet $GOOGL shares tumbling as much as 7% on Monday — a drop that, if it holds, would mark the steepest single-session loss for the stock in over a year.
Noam Shazeer, who held the title of vice president of engineering and shared leadership of the Gemini AI models, set off the wave of departures when he announced last week that OpenAI would be his next destination. His return to Google had come less than two years earlier: in August 2024, a partnership deal with Character.AI — the startup Shazeer and fellow researcher Daniel De Freitas had co-founded after departing Google in 2021 — brought both men back into the fold, according to CNBC.
The second blow landed Friday, when John Jumper disclosed he was departing Google DeepMind for Anthropic, ending a nine-year tenure at the company. A 2024 Nobel Prize recipient alongside DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis, Jumper built his reputation largely on AlphaFold — a DeepMind AI tool whose predictions of more than 200 million protein structures have dramatically accelerated biological and medical research. Alphabet confirmed his departure.
"We are grateful for John's significant contributions to Google DeepMind's work in advancing science and AI," Alphabet said in a statement to Barron's. "We wish him well in his next chapter."
Anthropic confirmed that Jumper will join the company.
"Losing John is a big loss for Google and there is no way to sugarcoat it," Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said.
D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria said the back-to-back exits were raising questions about Google's standing in the competition for top AI talent. "The departures of Noam Shazeer to OpenAI and John Jumper to Anthropic within a couple of days are raising the concern that Google is losing the war for talent at the frontier of AI," Luria said.
Adding to Monday's selling pressure was a Wall Street Journal interview Satya Nadella gave Sunday in which the Microsoft $MSFT chief argued that reliance on dominant AI providers should shrink and characterized the AI market as increasingly commoditized. Alphabet has raised $141 billion in debt and equity since October as it works to build out its AI infrastructure.
As of Monday's session, Alphabet shares were trading around $346.30, a loss of roughly 5.9%. The stock has shed about 9% over the course of June, though it still carries a gain of approximately 11% on a year-to-date basis.