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Alphabet stock (GOOG) fell as much as 5% on Wednesday after four of Google’s most-cited researchers quit on the same day. Chief scientist Jeff Dean is leaving after 27 years.
The same announcement pushed Demis Hassabis out of daily control of Google DeepMind. Koray Kavukcuoglu now runs Gemini.
Alphabet’s Google (GOOG) Stock Performance. Source: Yahoo FinanceGoogle AI Leaders Quit as Talent Losses Mount
The damage arrived inside an hour. Shares touched $381.81 before the news landed. They bottomed at $355.16 after it. That is a swing of almost 7% in one session.
The stock later steadied near $360.71, down 3.9% from Tuesday’s close of $375.35. Alphabet is worth $4.61 trillion. Wednesday’s slide erased close to $190 billion of that. At the low the figure was nearer $260 billion.
The stock still trades about 11% below its 52-week high of $404.47.
Investors have run this play before. Alphabet closed 5.1% lower on June 22, its worst session in a year, after two researchers left days apart.
Noam Shazeer went to OpenAI. He was the second of eight authors on the 2017 paper that introduced the transformer. Almost every chatbot in use today is built on that design.
John Jumper joined Anthropic. He shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Hassabis for predicting protein structures. One of those two laureates has left Google. The other has now stepped back from running its AI lab.
Discovery Loop Wants to Automate Research Itself
Dean is founding Discovery Loop with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le. The company says the four include three of the most-cited names in artificial intelligence. Two also rank among the most-cited in distributed systems.
Dean joined Google in mid-1999 as its 30th employee. He and Ghemawat built MapReduce in 2004 and Bigtable in 2006. Those systems let Google index the web at scale.
“we are founding Discovery Loop … a Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress,” Dean shared.
A public benefit corporation is a for-profit firm whose directors must weigh a stated mission alongside profit.
The plan starts narrow. Discovery Loop will automate machine learning research and test the tools on itself first. Medicine, solar energy and cybersecurity come later.
Google is not cutting ties, the company’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, noted.
Hassabis Moves Up as Kavukcuoglu Takes DeepMind
Hassabis becomes chair of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet. He keeps leading Isomorphic Labs, the drug discovery arm. He is not leaving the company.
Kavukcuoglu steps up as senior vice president after 13 years at the lab, where he was chief technology officer. He now owns Gemini model development, frontier research and the Gemini app.
Google’s AI Brain DrainThe reshuffle partly unwinds a structure built three years ago. Google merged DeepMind and Google Brain in April 2023 to pool its AI work. Dean became chief scientist in that merger. He is now gone, and the unit has lost its chief executive.
The business is not the problem. Alphabet reported revenue of $119.8 billion for the quarter ended June 30, up 24%. Google Cloud grew 82% to $24.8 billion. Operating margin widened to 34%.
That gap is the story. Big Tech beat estimates and still sold off in July. Investors are pricing the next model, not the last quarter.
The Gemini app has passed 950 million monthly users, and Hassabis told staff that Gemini 4 is coming. Google’s AI race strategy split from rivals well before this week.
Gemini 4 is now the test. It will be the first flagship model Google ships without the researcher who has shaped its AI since 2011.
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