In an unusual trajectory for its capital market trading this year, Alphabet shares were down 5.46% on the Nasdaq at around 2:20 PM (local time), trading at $347.39, valuing the holding company at $4.24 trillion.
The starting point for this decline in stock prices is the increasingly intense – and expensive – competition among big tech companies for top artificial intelligence (AI) professionals. And, on this front, Google 's parent company has just suffered another significant loss in its team. In just a few days and, once again, to a competitor.
Last Friday, John Jumper announced in a post on X that he is leaving Google DeepMind, the division that leads Alphabet's AI efforts, where he served as a senior research scientist, after a nine-year tenure. His new destination? Rival Anthropic .
Several factors underscore the weight of this loss. One of them is Jumper's reputation, as he holds the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, to be awarded in 2024, alongside David Baker and Demis Hassabis, the latter being the founder and CEO of Google DeepMind.
Jumper also accumulated impressive credentials in his work at the division. Among other things, he helped create AlphaFold, the artificial intelligence system that predicts protein structures from their amino acid sequences, and which fundamentally accelerated biological and medical research.
“John’s departure is a huge loss for Google and there’s no way to downplay it,” Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, told the American magazine Barron’s . “Investors don’t want to see this and the negative reaction is instinctive,” he added, regarding the drop in shares.
At the same time, Jumper's departure became public just one day after Noam Shazeer, another important figure, left the group for a rival. Vice president of engineering at Google and one of the key figures at Google Gemini, he switched companies for OpenAI , the owner of ChatGPT.
“I’m very happy to share that I will be joining OpenAI and I look forward to working with the exceptional team there,” Shazeer said, also in a post on X.
He had returned to Google less than two years after leaving the company, which paid dearly for his return. In 2024, the tech giant spent US$2.7 billion to acquire Character.AI, a chatbot startup co-founded by Shazeer.
“The departures of Noam Shazeer to OpenAI and John Jumper to Anthropic within a few days are raising concerns that Google is losing the war for talent at the forefront of AI,” Gil Luria, an analyst at DA Davidson, also told Barron’s . He added:
“Google had the most advanced (AI) model for a few weeks last year, which helped the company be recognized as a winner in AI, but that performance has declined since then, and these exits may signal that the company is falling behind,” Luria noted.
Part of this indicator, if the downward trend in the company's shares is confirmed at the close of trading, Alphabet will register its largest daily percentage drop in over a year. However, by 2026, the shares are still projected to have accumulated a 10.7% gain.
