Google Loses AI Pioneer Noam Shazeer to OpenAI

OpenAI has hired Noam Shazeer, a former Israeli-born Google executive and one of the field’s pioneers, in a major talent raid that Google cannot afford to ignore. Shazeer announced on Thursday that he is leaving Google, where he served as vice president of engineering and helped lead Gemini AI models, to join OpenAI. Google had previously paid $2.7 billion to bring him back.

In a post on X, Shazeer wrote that he was “happy to share” he would join OpenAI and said he was looking forward to working with its team. He added, “This was a hard decision to move on. I am very proud of the amazing team at Google and everything we built together.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman replied that Shazeer was “one of the people I most wanted to work with since we founded OpenAI,” adding, “It only took 10 years, but I think it was worth the wait.”

Shazeer had returned to Google in August 2024, when the company brought him and researcher Daniel De Freitas into DeepMind through a partnership with their startup Character.AI. The two had left Google in 2021 after the company would not aggressively advance a chatbot project they supported. They then founded Character.AI, which became one of the most prominent AI startups.

The move comes amid intense competition among tech companies for AI talent, and only weeks after Google unveiled new products at its annual I/O developers conference, including Gemini 3.5 Flash and the Gemini Spark AI agent. It also comes as OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, filed confidentially earlier this month for an initial public offering, with OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX expected to be among the biggest IPO stories in recent years.

Shazeer, who began working at Google US in 2000, is credited with helping develop the Transformer architecture, the foundation of modern AI models and the “T” in GPT. His papers at Google are seen as key milestones in AI development. He left Google in 2021 after concluding the company was not moving fast enough on AI, then built Character.AI, where the team created chatbot personas modeled on figures such as Oprah Winfrey and Elon Musk.