Jun 18, 2026
Noam Shazeer is leaving Google for OpenAI. The co-author of what's arguably the most influential AI paper ever written, "Attention Is All You Need," served as Vice President of Engineering at Google and co-led the company's Gemini models alongside Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals. "It was a difficult decision to move on," Shazeer wrote.
via X
Shazeer joined Google in 2000, where he worked on improvements including the search engine's spell checker. In 2021, he left to co-found the AI chatbot startup Character.AI. He returned to Google in 2024 as part of a $2.7 billion deal that brought him and co-founder Daniel De Freitas back along with parts of the research team - specifically to improve Google's reasoning models, which still haven't caught up with OpenAI and Anthropic. His move to OpenAI is the biggest AI talent story of the year so far, right up there with Andrej Karpathy joining Anthropic.
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