The battle for top artificial intelligence talent is showing no signs of slowing down: Noam Shazeer, one of Google’s most prominent AI figures and a vice president of engineering who co-led work on Gemini, is leaving the company to join rival OpenAI.
Shazeer’s move comes less than two years after Google paid about $2.7 billion in a deal that brought him and Character.AI co-founder Daniel De Freitas back to the company, along with members of their research team, while giving Google nonexclusive rights to use Character.AI’s technology.
It is the second time Shazeer, 50, has left Google. He first joined the company in 2000 and spent 17 years there, becoming one of the researchers behind the 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the transformer architecture that helped fuel the modern generative AI boom.
In 2021, he left Google and co-founded Character.AI, a chatbot startup that developed a popular and controversial service allowing users to choose or create characters and hold open-ended conversations with them.
One of AI’s top talents
Shazeer is considered one of the leading figures in global AI, with research that has become foundational for large language models and other modern AI systems. In 2023, Time named him one of the 100 most influential people in AI.
Until Wednesday, Shazeer served at Google as a co-lead of the company’s Gemini AI model efforts. He was widely seen as a central figure in Google’s push to narrow the gap with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Shazeer announced his departure in a post on X, writing: “It was a difficult decision to move on. I'm incredibly proud of the amazing team at Google and everything we've built together.” He added that he looked forward to joining the “exceptional team” at OpenAI.
Google said in a statement: “We are grateful for Noam’s many contributions to Google over the years.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman welcomed the move in his own post on X, writing that Shazeer “is one of the people I have most wanted to work with since the very beginning of openai,” adding: “only took 10 years. i think it will be worth the wait!”
Shazeer lives in Palo Alto and is married to Yael Shacham Shazeer, a Google executive. The couple has three children. He is the grandson of Holocaust survivors who spent time in Israel before moving to the United States. His father, Dov, was a math teacher who became an engineer, and his sister, Shira, was ordained as a rabbi by Hebrew College.
Shazeer’s move is the latest in a series of high-profile talent shifts among leading AI companies. OpenAI, Google, Meta and Anthropic have been offering top researchers and engineers enormous compensation packages and complex hiring deals in an effort to secure the people seen as most capable of shaping the next generation of AI systems.