The Financial Post reports in its Friday edition that for much of the last year, Alphabet was the Big Tech stock to beat as investors bet that it was the most likely winner from the artificial-intelligence boom. A Bloomberg dispatch to the Post says Alphabet shares hit an all-time high on May 13 after soaring more than 150 per cent in the previous 12 months, putting them among the 25 best performers in the S&P 500 Index over that stretch and far outpacing the other Magnificent Seven tech players. But the momentum has reversed since then due to questions about a brain drain at Google's parent and fears that the company is losing its edge in AI. The stock is down 15 per cent from its peak, erasing $692-billion (U.S.) in market value. At the crux of the sell-off is Alphabet's suddenly shaky standing in the AI race, with its heavy spending on building out the infrastructure to develop the technology and the delayed release of its new Gemini AI model weighing on investor sentiment. Then there's the personnel issue. A few months ago, Google lost two top employees to Anthropic PBC and OpenAI. Also, Jeff Dean, who was key to Google's AI strategy, departed to launch a start-up and took several key co-workers with him.