Alphabet (GOOGL) on Solana

Alphabet is losing two of its most prominent AI researchers in the latest wave of departures from Google's AI program. Noam Shazeer, Gemini co-lead and co-author of the landmark 2017 transformer architecture paper, is set to leave for OpenAI — a notable blow given Google had paid $2.7 billion to rehire him in 2024. John Jumper, a Google DeepMind director who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on AlphaFold protein-structure prediction and led Google's AI coding efforts, is joining Anthropic. The departures are part of a broader pattern of senior AI talent defecting to Alphabet's chief competitors.

Google's shares have fallen more than 6% over five trading days following the announcements, wiping out roughly $270 billion in market value. DA Davidson's technology research head said Google is "losing the war for talent at the frontier of AI," noting the company held the state-of-the-art model briefly last year before ceding ground. The talent drain arrives just as Alphabet joins the Dow Jones Industrial Average on June 29, replacing Verizon — a milestone that analysts note carries limited practical weight given the Dow's price-weighted structure.

Alphabet will join the Dow Jones Industrial Average effective before market open on June 29, 2026, replacing Verizon in the 30-stock index. S&P Dow Jones Indices, which manages the DJIA, announced the change, marking the first time the Google parent has been included in the benchmark index.

The addition reflects Alphabet's growing centrality to the U.S. economy, spanning search, cloud computing, and AI. Verizon's removal continues a broader shift in the index away from legacy telecoms and toward technology and digital-services companies that now dominate U.S. market capitalization.