(Bloomberg) — Alphabet Inc. shares tumbled on Monday following the departure of another high-profile artificial intelligence leader to a rival.
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The stock fell as much as 7.2%, the most intraday since February, after Google DeepMind Vice President John Jumper said over the weekend he was leaving for Anthropic. Last week, one of Google’s most prominent researchers, Noam Shazeer, announced he was leaving for OpenAI.
The departure of Jumper, a key member of Google’s AI coding development team, comes as Google has struggled to sell AI coding tools to businesses, according to former employees. It’s also an area that has driven momentum for Anthropic and OpenAI in recent months.
“OpenAI and Anthropic are increasingly the dominant frontier firms in the US and seem to be pulling away from models and coding tools from Google, Meta, and xAI,” Adam Crisafulli, founder of newsletter Vital Knowledge, wrote on Sunday. Jumper’s departure “is not helping Google,” he said.
Alphabet’s drop comes amid broader weakness in other megacap tech stocks with a Bloomberg index tracking the so-called Magnificent Seven falling as much as 2.2% on Monday. Amazon.com Inc. was down as much as 4.9% while Meta Platforms Inc. and Microsoft Corp. both fell more than 2%.
Jumper won the 2024 Nobel Prize alongside DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis for creating an AI model that can predict the structure of proteins called AlphaFold.
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