Alphabet shares fell as much as 7% on Monday, on track for the stock’s steepest single-session drop in over a year, after two prominent AI researchers left Google for rivals within days of each other. Noam Shazeer, a Gemini co-lead who rejoined Google less than two years ago through the Character.AI deal, announced last week he’s heading to OpenAI, followed Friday by DeepMind’s John Jumper, a 2024 Nobel winner known for the protein-structure tool AlphaFold, departing for Anthropic. Analysts framed the back-to-back exits as raising questions about whether Google is losing the war for top AI talent, with one calling Jumper’s loss impossible to sugarcoat. Adding pressure was a weekend interview in which Microsoft’s Satya Nadella called the AI market increasingly commoditized, as Alphabet works to recoup the $141B it has raised since October for AI infrastructure.
