Noam Shazeer is leaving Google for OpenAI. The man widely credited as a principal architect of Google’s Gemini models and a co-author of the 2017 transformer paper that underpins virtually every modern large language model announced the move himself, on X: “I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there.”
The departure is striking for its speed. Shazeer returned to Google less than two years ago in a deal that was itself remarkable: the company reportedly paid around $2.7bn to bring him back, along with a team of his researchers, from Character.AI, the startup he had co-founded after leaving Google the first time.
To lose him again, this quickly, to the company Google most directly competes with, is the kind of talent loss that money was supposed to prevent.
Shazeer is a vice president of engineering at Google and a co-leader of the Gemini effort. As one of the authors of “Attention Is All You Need”, the paper that introduced the transformer architecture, he is among a small group of researchers whose work sits underneath ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and most of what the industry now calls AI. His decision to switch sides carries weight beyond a single hire.
