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Google is on pace for its worst day on the stock market in a year, as artificial intelligence<\/a> concerns have mounted and two high-profile researchers departed for rivals in recent days.<\/p>\n Shares of parent company Alphabet<\/a> slid 7% on Monday morning, underperforming both the Nasdaq and the rest of their megacap peers.<\/p>\n The brain drain concerns began last week when Google’s vice president of engineering and a co-lead of its Gemini AI models, Noam Shazeer<\/a>, announced Wednesday that he was leaving the company to join rival OpenAI. Shazeer’s departure came less than two years<\/a> after he returned to Google. <\/p>\n In August 2024, Google brought back Shazeer and fellow researcher Daniel De Freitas to its DeepMind AI unit as part of a partnership with startup Character.AI, which the pair founded after leaving Google in 2021.\u00a0<\/p>\n The departure came weeks after Google unveiled new AI products<\/a>, including its Gemini 3.5 Flash model and Gemini Spark AI agent, at its annual I\/O developer conference.<\/p>\n Another exit came on Friday, when John Jumper, DeepMind vice president and engineering fellow, announced<\/a> he was leaving the company after nine years for rival Anthropic. <\/p>\n Jumper, who won a Nobel Prize alongside Google’s Demis Hassabis<\/a> in 2024, is best known as the co-creator of AlphaFold, a breakthrough AI that has predicted more than 200 million protein structures, cutting years off biological and medical research.<\/p>\n The share slide also came on the heels of a Sunday Wall Street Journal<\/a> interview with Microsoft<\/a> CEO Satya Nadella<\/a>, who called for less dependence on “AI Giants” and said the AI market was commoditized.\u00a0<\/p>\n Alphabet has been spending<\/a> heavily on AI, including raising $141 billion in debt and equity since October. The company has been trying to prove that its vertically integrated AI stack can generate returns. <\/p>\n If models become cheaper and more interchangeable, as noted in Nadella’s interview, investors may question whether that spending is building a durable advantage or simply adding pressure to margins. <\/p>\n Google users on Monday also reported<\/a> outages on Gmail and YouTube.<\/p>\n Alphabet one-year stock chart.<\/p>\n![\"Google](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/108322058-1781543240844-1781297958-46507594872-hd.jpg\")
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