On June 23, Alphabet (GOOGL) fell 3.04% in pre-market trading, trading at $341.06/share, with turnover of $34.08 million. The decline extends the prior session's roughly 5% sell-off, which erased approximately $2,250 billion in market capitalization — the largest single-day drop since May of last year.
The continued selling pressure stems from the departure of two cornerstone AI researchers within just three days. On June 17, Noam Shazeer — co-author of the foundational Transformer architecture paper and co-lead of the Gemini large language model — announced he would leave to join OpenAI. Google had spent approximately $2.7 billion to bring Shazeer back from Character.AI in 2024, making his departure after less than two years particularly damaging to investor confidence. On June 20, John Jumper, lead architect of AlphaFold and co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, announced his departure to join Anthropic.
With these exits, all eight original authors of the Transformer paper have now left Google. Market participants are reassessing Alphabet's competitive positioning in frontier AI model development, particularly as its Gemini model has shown slipping rankings in recent benchmark tests relative to offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic.
(The above content is based on publicly available market information, generated by a program or algorithm, and is intended solely as a stock movement alert. It does not constitute investment advice or a basis for trading decisions.)
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