Noam Shazeer, the Jewish-American AI engineer and former Israeli resident widely seen as one of the chief architects of the AI revolution, is leaving Google for OpenAI. OpenAI informed employees of his arrival, and Shazeer confirmed the move in a post on X. The shift is one of the biggest talent moves in artificial intelligence in recent years, as tech giants spend enormous sums to win top researchers and engineers.
Shazeer is not an ordinary senior researcher. He was one of the seven authors of the 2017 Google paper, “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the transformer architecture. That technology underpins most leading language models today, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has previously said the paper “changed the world.”
The move is especially notable because Shazeer has had a complicated relationship with Google. After about 20 years at the company, he left in 2021 over disagreements about the pace at which Google was developing and releasing AI products to the public. Together with Daniel De Freitas, he co-founded Character.AI, a startup whose chatbot platform quickly attracted millions of users.
In summer 2024, Google brought him back in an unusual deal worth about $2.7 billion, buying a license to Character.AI’s technology and hiring Shazeer plus roughly 30 staffers into its AI teams. The deal was seen as one of Silicon Valley’s most expensive talent-acquisition moves, but it was not a full acquisition. Most of the money went to investors, and a Globe report last year said Shazeer personally ended up with only tens of millions of dollars after dilution, investor preferences and other payments.
At OpenAI, Shazeer will work on new AI architectures and on improving the transformer model that most of the field still relies on. The company sees the hire as a major boost in its race with Google and Anthropic to build the next generation of advanced models. Shazeer has also faced controversy, including legal settlements involving Character.AI after claims that its chatbots contributed to mental-health crises among teenagers, as well as internal criticism at Google over political and social posts. Even so, he remains one of the most influential researchers in the field.
