OpenAI Poaches Transformer Pioneer Noam Shazeer From Google

OpenAI has hired Noam Shazeer, Google’s Gemini co-lead and one of the researchers behind the Transformer architecture that powers today’s leading large language models.

Shazeer confirmed the move in a post on X. “I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there,” he wrote.

Calling the decision difficult, he added, “I’m incredibly proud of the amazing team at Google and everything we’ve built together. It has been an honour and a pleasure to work with all of you.”

The departure is a significant blow to Google’s AI efforts. Shazeer currently serves as a vice president of engineering and co-lead of Gemini, Google’s flagship family of AI models. 

He returned to Google DeepMind in 2024 after co-founding Character.AI, the chatbot startup that quickly became one of the most prominent AI companies outside the major tech giants.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly welcomed the hire, writing on X that Shazeer was “one of the people I have most wanted to work with since the very beginning of OpenAI,” adding that the company had waited a decade to make it happen.

Shazeer was a co-author of the landmark 2017 ‘Attention Is All You Need’ paper that introduced the Transformer architecture, the foundation of today’s LLMs. He also helped pioneer Mixture-of-Experts architectures, contributed to Google’s LaMDA conversational AI system, and played important roles in developing major language models such as PaLM and Gemini.

The move comes less than two years after Google spent billions to bring him back.

Shazeer joined Google in 2000 and spent more than two decades at the company before leaving in 2021 after Google declined to release a chatbot he had developed with Daniel De Freitas. The pair went on to found Character.AI, which quickly gained millions of users and attracted significant investor interest.  

In 2024, Google struck a deal worth roughly $2.7 billion to license Character.AI’s technology and rehire Shazeer and several key employees. Following the transaction, Shazeer became a technical lead for Gemini, working alongside senior Google AI leaders, including Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals.

His jump to OpenAI is the latest example of the escalating AI talent war among OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic. Leading AI researchers and engineers have become some of the most sought-after employees in the technology industry, with companies increasingly relying on aggressive recruiting, acqui-hire deals and multimillion-dollar compensation packages to gain an edge in the race to build more powerful models.

The timing is particularly notable as OpenAI continues to expand its research organisation and prepare for a potential future public offering.