Google Lost $700 Billion in Three Months—Did AI’s Biggest Winner Stumble?

A year ago, it was Wall Street’s biggest winner in the AI wave: Its stock surged 150% in 12 months, outperforming all seven major tech companies and basking in unprecedented glory. Now? It has fallen 15% in three months, wiping out nearly $700 billion in market value and becoming the individual stock dragging down the S&P 500 the most.

What happened? Two words: talent and models. On August 5, Jeff Dean, Google’s key AI figure, announced his departure to start a company and took a group of core executives with him; Demis Hassabis, head of DeepMind, also stepped down as CEO. The news sent the stock plunging 4% in a single day, wiping out hundreds of billions of dollars overnight.

Even more painful is the model situation: The flagship Gemini 3.5 Pro keeps getting delayed, with no timeline in sight. The market generally agrees that its programming capabilities have been left far behind by Anthropic and OpenAI—and that happens to be the AI monetization sector with the strongest potential. While burning cash to build AI infrastructure, free cash flow has already turned negative—and it just finished issuing $25 billion in bonds.

But Google hasn’t simply given up. Over the past couple of days, it has released Gemini 3.5 Transcribe and the Omni 1.1 Flash video model in succession. The question is: Can these new products restore the $700 billion in market confidence?

What do you think—Is this a golden opportunity for Google, or is it really about to be left behind in the AI era? base:0xb2000000000000000000002d0ba3164cc74f58b7