Alphabet shares plunge as top AI researchers defect

Alphabet Inc. saw its shares fall sharply on Monday, erasing hundreds of billions of dollars in market value, following the departure of two of its most prominent artificial intelligence researchers to rival firms. The stock of Google's parent company dropped approximately 6 to 7 percent during the trading session, underperforming broader market indices.

The selloff was triggered by consecutive announcements that key AI leaders were leaving the company. Noam Shazeer, Google's vice president of engineering and a co-lead of the Gemini AI platform, announced he was joining OpenAI. Shazeer is a highly influential figure in AI research, best known as a co-author of the seminal 2017 paper that introduced the transformer architecture behind modern large language models. His departure comes less than two years after Google struck a deal to bring him back from the startup Character.AI.

Shortly after, John Jumper, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind, announced he was leaving for Anthropic. Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work, was instrumental in developing AlphaFold, the protein-structure prediction system that has mapped over 200 million proteins...