Noam Shazeer, a Gemini co-lead and founder of Character.AI, is leaving Google for OpenAI. He co-authored the seminal 2017 Transformer paper that sparked modern large language models.
Noam Shazeer, a Gemini co-lead at Google and founder of Character.AI, is leaving to join OpenAI. Google had rehired him in 2024 through a $2.7 billion deal with Character.AI for technology rights and his return.
Shazeer joined Google in 2000 and co-authored the seminal 2017 'Attention Is All You Need' paper that launched the LLM era. He founded Character.AI in 2021 before Google's 2024 acqui-hire. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he had wanted to work with Shazeer since OpenAI's early days.
Google loses one of its Transformer inventors, weakening its AI leadership. OpenAI gains a top talent, intensifying the AI talent war and potentially accelerating talent concentration at leading labs.