Alphabet shares tumble 7% as top AI scientists exit for rivals

Alphabet Inc., the parent of Google, saw its shares drop 7% in a single trading session, wiping roughly $269 billion from its market capitalisation. The decline followed announcements that two senior AI researchers were leaving the company.

Noam Shazeer, Vice President of Engineering who co‑led the Gemini project and co‑authored the influential paper “Attention Is All You Need,” will join OpenAI. John Jumper, a DeepMind scientist who shared the 2024 Nobel Chemistry prize for the AlphaFold protein‑folding system, is moving to Anthropic, a rival AI firm. Investors cited the loss of these rare talent assets as a deeper concern than any short‑term earnings or legal issue.

The departures raise questions about Google’s ability to retain the creators of core AI technologies such as the Transformer architecture and AlphaFold. While Alphabet continues to invest heavily in data‑centre capacity and GPU hardware, the migration of key scientists to competitors is seen as a potential strategic vulnerability in the fast‑moving artificial‑intelligence race.