Another one… actually, make that two… bite the dust. ❌

Apparently, the latest Silicon Valley drama isn’t about products or profits, but people.

Specifically, who has them and who’s losing them. And right now? Google’s parent company Alphabet is looking a little… let’s just say… not on the A list anymore. 🍸

The tech world is all about AI right now and you can think of the most popular names involved like the hottest clubs in town. Everyone wants in, the lines are long, and the bouncers (aka top researchers) decide who’s worth the hype.

Right now, the VIP sections are filling up elsewhere, and Alphabet just lost two of its biggest names to the competition. 😬

To name names, Noam Shazeer, a key architect behind the company’s Gemini models, is heading to OpenAI, while Nobel Prize-winning researcher John Jumper is making the jump to Anthropic.

For investors, this brain drain matters, as lose the people, and suddenly all those billion-dollar models and infrastructure bets start to look like lego sets.

So they wasted zero time reacting. Alphabet (GOOG) shares dropped over 5% on Monday, marking its worst day in about a year and underperforming its megacap tech peers.

Yeah… not exactly the kind of headline you want when you’ve been aggressively pitching yourself as an AI leader, and poured massive capital into the project (specifically $141 billion in debt and equity since late last year). 📉

What’s also concerning is if AI models become more commoditized (as some industry experts are already hinting at), then the return on that investment becomes a lot less clear.

AKA if everyone can build similar models, then no one is special anymore nor has the right to charge absurd prices like the are now. And suddenly, those sky-high capex numbers start raising eyebrows instead of excitement. 🤔