Noam Shazeer, a co-leader of Google's Gemini AI models and the company's vice president of engineering, is leaving to join OpenAI. According to CNBC, he announced the move on Wednesday.
Shazeer is one of the most prominent figures in modern artificial intelligence. The Decoder notes he co-authored the landmark "Attention Is All You Need" paper, the research that introduced the Transformer architecture underpinning today's chatbots; one outlet, Moomoo, calls him the "father of the Transformer." He also founded the chatbot startup Character.AI.
What makes the exit striking is its timing. As The Decoder and CTech report, Shazeer only returned to Google from Character.AI in 2024, as part of a deal valued at roughly $2.7 billion. In other words, Google paid an enormous sum to bring him back barely two years before he decided to leave again. NDTV Profit reports that Shazeer described the departure as a "difficult decision."
Bloomberg framed the hire as a "coup" for OpenAI, and several outlets, including those carried on MSN, characterized Shazeer as being "poached" from Google. The Decoder points out this is the second major AI hiring shake-up in a short span, following Andrej Karpathy's reported move to Anthropic. The shift also comes, according to mezha.net, as an OpenAI IPO looms.
Why it matters: the world's leading AI labs are now competing as fiercely for a small pool of elite researchers as they are for customers, and the back-and-forth movement of a figure like Shazeer shows that even billion-dollar retention deals may not be enough to keep top talent in place.