Google Gains Spot on Dow Jones While Losing Street Cred in AI

In some ways, getting named to the Dow Jones Industrial Average is like a 37th birthday: First, it doesn’t mean as much as it used to.

Second, it’s an unmistakable indicator of the transition from trendsetting youth to comparatively staid “adulting.”

Exhibit A(BC): Google-parent Alphabet is set to replace Verizon on the price-weighted 30-company index next week, a sign that the once definitive disruptor is now, at least notionally, a steady industrial titan of the modern age. 

Talent Wars

In fact, Google has found itself more of the disruptee in recent days, unable to shake a pair of plucky young competitors nipping at its heels. Its shares have been hammered in the past week as two top artificial intelligence researchers spurned the company to join OpenAI and Anthropic. In what may be the most costly LinkedIn profile updates of all time, the resignations helped wipe out $270 billion of the company’s market value. 

Outsized as it may seem, the extraordinary fallout may match the extraordinary scope of the brain drain:

• First, Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer said last week that he was leaving the company to join OpenAI. Shazeer co-wrote a pivotal research paper in 2017 that pioneered the “transformer architecture” now underpinning much of the AI industry (the “T” in ChatGPT stands for “transformer”); Google paid $2.7 billion to “acqui-hire,” or “acqui-rehire,” Shazeer in 2024 after he left the Big Tech company three years earlier to launch Character.AI.
• Days later, veteran Google DeepMind director John Jumper said he’d be jumping ship to join Anthropic. Jumper had been an integral part of Google’s AI coding team and won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work using his AlphaFold deep learning algorithm to predict protein structures.

“Google is losing the war for talent at the frontier of AI,” DA Davidson’s head of technology research, Gil Luria, told Barron’s earlier this week. “Google had the state-of-the-art model for a few weeks last year, which helped it get credit as an AI winner, but has fallen off since, and these departures may mean it is falling behind.”

This Is Dow You Do It: Google’s stock is now down more than 6% in the past five trading days, after slipping 0.3% on Wednesday. Unfortunately, the Dow listing likely won’t confer extra credibility. Fellow tech titans Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Nvidia have already beaten it to the Dow punch, and show that addition to the index hardly provides a bump. Nvidia and Amazon fell 0.8% and 0.1%, respectively, on their Dow Inauguration Days in 2024. The index is weighted by share price, not market cap. Meaning that, given their roughly equal stock prices, it’s the one place that Home Depot (market cap: $341 billion) can say it’s on equal footing with the $4.2 trillion Google.

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