Alphabet Inc. shares tumbled on Monday following the departure of another high-profile artificial intelligence leader to a rival.
The stock fell as much as 7.2%, the most intraday since February, after Google DeepMind Vice President John Jumper said over the weekend he was leaving for Anthropic. Last week, one of Google's most prominent researchers, Noam Shazeer, announced he was leaving for OpenAI.
The two exits within days are sparking concern that “Google is losing the war for talent at the frontier of AI,” DA Davidson head of technology research Gil Luria said. “Google had the state-of-the-art model for a few weeks last year which helped it get credit as an AI winner but has fallen off since, and these departures may mean it is falling behind.”
Luria added that investors were selling shares of companies that are spending money on AI compute, like Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet while buying the companies that are taking that money, like Micron Technology Inc. Micron climbed as much as 6.2% in Monday trading.
The departure of Jumper, a key member of Google's AI coding development team, comes as Google has struggled to sell AI coding tools to businesses, according to former employees. It's also an area that has driven momentum for Anthropic and OpenAI in recent months.
“OpenAI and Anthropic are increasingly the dominant frontier firms in the US and seem to be pulling away from models and coding tools from Google, Meta, and xAI,” Adam Crisafulli, founder of newsletter Vital Knowledge, wrote on Sunday. Jumper's departure “is not helping Google,” he said.
Alphabet's drop comes amid broader weakness in other megacap tech stocks. A Bloomberg index tracking the so-called Magnificent Seven fell as much as 2.2% on Monday. Amazon was down as much as 5% while Meta Platforms Inc. and Microsoft both fell more than 3%.
Jumper won the 2024 Nobel Prize alongside DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis for creating an AI model that can predict the structure of proteins called AlphaFold.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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