Top Google AI Brains Bolted in 7 Days as Gemini Falls Behind, and Alphabet Stock Is Feeling It

Alphabet’s AI talent churn is the main theme as Google loses multiple researchers in just seven days while investors worry Gemini is falling behind. Alphabet shares fell 5.09% over the past week to $345.29 and dropped another 1.14% on Thursday morning to $341.34. The reported departures include Noam Shazeer, a Gemini co-lead and co-author of the Transformer paper, moving to OpenAI, while John Jumper, behind AlphaFold and a Nobel laureate, is heading to Anthropic. DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis described a “ferociously competitive” talent market. Analysts cited a perceived product gap versus coding assistants like Codex and Claude Code, which can be enterprise “wedge” offerings. Meanwhile, underlying performance remains strong: Q1 FY26 delivered EPS of $5.11 vs $2.63 expected on $109.90 billion revenue (+21.8% YoY), and Google Cloud rose 63% to $20.03 billion with backlog over $460 billion.