
Google's Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer joins OpenAI after two-year return stint
Quick Answer
Noam Shazeer, co-lead of Google's Gemini models and co-author of the 'Attention Is All You Need' paper, has joined OpenAI after a brief return to Google from Character.AI in 2024.
Quick Take
This marks a significant shift in AI talent following Karpathy's recent move to Anthropic.
Key Points
- Shazeer co-authored the influential 'Attention Is All You Need' paper.
- He was co-lead of Google's Gemini models before joining OpenAI.
- Shazeer returned to Google in 2024 as part of a $2.7 billion deal.
- His move to OpenAI follows another significant AI hiring shift this year.
- Karpathy's transition to Anthropic adds to the competitive AI landscape.
📖 Reader Mode
~1 min readNoam Shazeer is leaving Google for OpenAI. The co-author of what's arguably the most influential AI paper ever written, "Attention Is All You Need," served as Vice President of Engineering at Google and co-led the company's Gemini models alongside Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals. "It was a difficult decision to move on," Shazeer wrote.

Shazeer joined Google in 2000, where he worked on improvements including the search engine's spell checker. In 2021, he left to co-found the AI chatbot startup Character.AI. He returned to Google in 2024 as part of a $2.7 billion deal that brought him and co-founder Daniel De Freitas back along with parts of the research team - specifically to improve Google's reasoning models, which still haven't caught up with OpenAI and Anthropic. His move to OpenAI is the biggest AI talent story of the year so far, right up there with Andrej Karpathy joining Anthropic.
— Originally published at the-decoder.com
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