Last Updated:
Alphabet shares fell 5 percent, erasing 270 billion in value, after AI leaders Noam Shazeer joined OpenAI and John Jumper left Google DeepMind for Anthropic, spooking investors
Google’s Gemini 3 AI Model. Representative Image
Alphabet shares fell roughly 5% on June 19, wiping out approximately $270 billion in market value, after two senior AI researchers left the company within days of each other to join direct rivals.
The first to leave was Noam Shazeer. Google’s vice president of engineering and co-lead of its Gemini AI models, Shazeer announced on June 16 he was joining OpenAI.
Google had paid $2.7 billion in August 2024 to bring him back through a partnership deal with Character.AI, a startup he co-founded with fellow researcher Daniel De Freitas.
Three days later, John Jumper said he was leaving Google DeepMind after nine years to join Anthropic. Jumper, an engineering fellow, co-created AlphaFold, the protein-structure prediction system, and won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis.
Why Jumper’s Exit Hit Different
AlphaFold is one of the more consequential things to have come out of Google’s AI labs. The system predicts a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence, a problem that once took researchers months or years to solve in a laboratory.
AlphaFold has now predicted over 200 million protein structures, nearly all catalogued proteins known to science, and is used by more than 3 million researchers across 190 countries working on problems from antimicrobial resistance to heart disease.
Its latest version, AlphaFold 3, released in May 2024 by DeepMind and its sister company Isomorphic Labs, is 50% more accurate than the best traditional methods on drug-like interactions, including how proteins bind with ligands and how antibodies engage their target proteins.
The pharmaceutical industry has estimated AI-assisted target identification could reduce Phase I drug development costs from $100 million to $70 million. Losing the man who built the original model, to a competitor, is not a clean headline for Google.
What Else Spooked Investors
The exits came weeks after Google had publicly showed off its Gemini 3.5 Flash model and new Gemini Spark AI agent at its annual I/O developer conference in May.
The sell-off also followed remarks by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, published in The Wall Street Journal, calling on the tech industry to reduce its dependence on AI giants and arguing the AI market was moving toward commoditisation.
Those comments cut at a specific pressure point for Alphabet: the company has been spending aggressively to build vertically integrated AI infrastructure, raising $141 billion in debt and equity since October 2024.
Alphabet’s market value stood at approximately $2.3 trillion before the session.
About the Author
Anoshito Banerjee is a digital journalist at CNN-News18, specialising in Indian foreign policy, global diplomacy, South and West Asian geopolitics, and strategic affairs. His reporting spans hard news…Read More
Washington D.C., United States of America (USA)
Read More
Source link
[ad_3]
