Google is at its worst pace in the stock market this year, as concerns about artificial intelligence grow and two prominent researchers leave for rival companies in recent days.
Parent company stock alphabet It was down 7% on Monday morning, underperforming the Nasdaq and other giant-cap peers.
Concerns about a brain drain began last week when Noam Shazeer, Google’s vice president of engineering and co-head of the Gemini AI model, announced on Wednesday that he was leaving the company to join rival OpenAI. Shazeer’s departure comes less than two years after he returned to Google.
In August 2024, Google brought Shazeer and fellow researcher Daniel De Freitas back to its DeepMind AI division as part of a partnership with Character.AI, the startup the two founded after leaving Google in 2021.
The departure comes weeks after Google announced new AI products at its annual I/O developer conference, including the Gemini 3.5 Flash model and the Gemini Spark AI agent.
DeepMind vice president and engineering fellow John Jumper announced another departure Friday, leaving the company after nine years at rival Anthropic.
Jumper, who shared the Nobel Prize with Google’s Demis Hassabis in 2024, is best known as the co-creator of AlphaFold, a breakthrough AI that predicted the structures of more than 200 million proteins and saved years of time for biological and medical research.
The stock’s decline also came on the heels of an interview in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal. microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called for less reliance on “AI giants” and said the AI market was becoming commoditized.
Alphabet has invested heavily in AI since October, raising $141 billion in debt and equity. The company has been trying to prove that a vertically integrated AI stack can generate profits.
As Nadella points out in his interview, as models become cheaper and more compatible, investors may question whether their spending is building a lasting advantage or just squeezing profits.
On Monday, Google users also reported outages in Gmail and YouTube.
Alphabet’s stock price chart for one year.
