Is AI Genius John Jumper Worth $250 Billion? Alphabet's Stock Plunge After His Departure Makes It Seem So.

Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) stock has had a rough few days. It notched a new all-time high at the start of June and stayed around those levels for a few weeks. However, it has lost over 6% of its value -- about $250 billion -- in just the past few days, apparently due to one event: The announcement that Google DeepMind's Vice President John Jumper was leaving for Anthropic. But can one employee really be worth that much to a company?

While Jumper is a huge name in the AI world, he wasn't the only high-profile individual to jump ship from Alphabet recently. Noam Shazeer, the Gemini model's co-lead, left for OpenAI the week before that.

Should this raise red flags for Alphabet investors?

Is Alphabet losing the AI race?

Neither of these departures was likely due to their compensation packages. Alphabet has the funds to pay its top people whatever it wants if it deems them worth the money. Furthermore, Alphabet is a company full of brilliant engineers and AI thinkers, and management may have let them go in part to allow new talent to rise to the top. On the flip side, both Jumper and Shazeer may have left because they didn't like the direction that Alphabet was heading, and wanted to work for a company that was more aligned with their ideals.

Whatever the reason may be, it's still concerning for Alphabet investors because losing the AI race isn't something it can afford to do. Alphabet's AI tools are likely the most commonly interacted with ones in the world, as its AI summaries are displayed with each Google Search result. If a competitor can launch a more useful product, that could endanger Alphabet's core business.

Additionally, Alphabet needs strong AI offerings to continue attracting clients to its Google Cloud platform. If it falls behind on AI, users may be more inclined to go with one of its competitors.

Still, even after the sell-off, Alphabet's stock is trading at a high valuation from a historical perspective.

When a company is going through a heavy capital investment cycle (like Alphabet is right now), its cash from operations metric is a particularly useful statistic to measure its share price against. On that score, Alphabet is still near the most expensive level it has seen in the past decade.

GOOG Price to CFO Per Share (TTM) data by YCharts.

Furthermore, Alphabet's sell-off also coincided with a broader sell-off in the AI space.

Because of that, I don't think it's time for shareholders to panic. Alphabet is still a top AI pick, even if two high-profile figures have left. It will also take each of them some time to get up to speed at their new positions, so there's no reason to expect overnight changes at Alphabet's competitors. While the optics around the departures may not be great, nothing has yet occurred that would call Alphabet's status as an AI titan into question.

Keithen Drury has positions in Alphabet. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.