Alphabet just lost one of the most important names in artificial intelligence. Noam Shazeer, co-lead of Google’s Gemini AI models and co-author of the 2017 Transformer paper that essentially birthed modern AI, announced he’s leaving for OpenAI.
Alphabet brought Shazeer back less than two years ago through a $2.7 billion deal that involved acquiring parts of his startup Character.AI.
The $2.7 billion boomerang
Shazeer took to social media on June 18 to announce his move, expressing enthusiasm about joining OpenAI’s team. The Transformer paper he co-authored in 2017 is arguably the single most consequential piece of AI research in the last decade, serving as the architectural backbone for virtually every large language model in existence today, from GPT to Gemini itself.
His departure is the second major AI leadership exit from Alphabet in recent months, part of a broader talent migration that has seen multiple high-profile researchers and engineers leave for competitors.
