Google is facing its worst day on the stock market in a year as concerns mount in the field of artificial intelligence and two prominent researchers recently defected to rivals. The stock price of Google parent company Alphabet fell 7% during the session, underperforming the Nasdaq index and other large technology giants.


Concerns about "brain drain" began last Wednesday, when Noam Shazeer, Google's vice president of engineering and co-lead of the GeminiAI model, announced that he would leave the company to join competitor OpenAI. It's been less than two years since he returned to Google.

In August 2024, Google re-recruited Shakir and his colleague Daniel DeFreitas into the DeepMindAI department through a cooperation with the startup Character.AI. The two founded Character.AI after leaving Google in 2021.

Shakir's departure comes just weeks after Google unveiled new AI products at its annual I/O developer conference, including Gemini 3.5 Flash models and Gemini Spark AI agents.

Another departure occurred on Friday, when DeepMind vice president and engineering researcher John Jumper announced that he would leave to join rival Anthropic after nine years with the company.

Jiang Po won the Nobel Prize in 2024 together with Google's Demis Hassabis. He is best known for co-creating AlphaFold, a breakthrough AI technology that has successfully predicted more than 200 million protein structures, shortening biological and medical research by years.

The stock price decline also follows an interview given by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Sunday. Nadella called for less reliance on "AI giants" and said the AI ​​market is moving toward "commoditization."

Alphabet has been investing heavily in AI, raising $141 billion in debt and equity since October. The company is trying to prove that its vertically integrated AI technology stack can pay off.

As Nadella pointed out in the interview, if AI models become cheaper and more easily replaced, investors may question whether these huge expenditures are building a lasting competitive advantage or simply adding pressure to profit margins.

In addition, Google users reported service outages on Gmail and YouTube on Monday.