Alphabet shares fell 4.03 per cent on 5 August as Jeff Dean left Google after 27 years alongside three senior AI researchers to launch Discovery Loop, a new artificial intelligence venture. The decline wiped roughly $186 billion (£138 billion) from Alphabet's market value, although the sell-off coincided with a wider reshuffle of Google's AI leadership and should not be attributed solely to the departures.
What made the announcement unusual was Google's response. Rather than severing ties with Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, Alphabet agreed to become a founding investor in Discovery Loop and a Google Cloud partner.
