Google’s Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer leaves to join OpenAI

Google Gemini Co-Lead Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

Noam Shazeer, a vice president of engineering at Google and co-lead of its Gemini artificial intelligence models, announced on Wednesday that he will leave the company to join OpenAI, according to Reuters. The move marks the departure of one of the AI industry’s most influential researchers from the company that paid $2.7 billion to bring him back less than two years ago.yahoo

A Foundational Figure in AI

Shazeer co-authored the 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the transformer architecture that underpins virtually every major AI system in use today, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s own Gemini models. He joined Google in 2000, just two years after the company’s founding, and spent more than two decades there before departing in 2021.startupfounderstories

OpenAI informed staff of the hire on Wednesday, describing Shazeer’s research as foundational to the generative AI boom. The company, which burned through $3.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026 on more than $5.7 billion in revenue, has been aggressively recruiting top AI talent as it competes with Google and Anthropic.sina

Google’s Costly Rehire Undone

Shazeer left Google in 2021 after the company declined to release a chatbot he had developed with colleague Daniel De Freitas. The two co-founded Character.AI, which reached a $1 billion valuation within 16 months. In August 2024, Google brought Shazeer back as part of a $2.7 billion licensing deal with Character.AI, appointing him as technical co-lead of Gemini alongside Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals.wsj

“We are thrilled to join the best team on earth building the most valuable technology on earth,” Shazeer wrote upon his return to Google in 2024. His departure now represents a reversal of one of the most expensive talent acquisitions in AI history — Shazeer personally netted an estimated $750 million to $1 billion from the deal.indiatimes

Intensifying Talent Wars

The hire underscores the escalating competition for elite AI researchers between OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Shazeer’s contributions extend beyond the transformer paper to foundational work on mixture-of-experts models and improvements to Gemini’s reasoning capabilities. His move to OpenAI comes as the company has also been considering price cuts to compete with Anthropic for customers.msn

Google has not publicly commented on Shazeer’s departure.