{"slug": "noam-shazeer-google-gemini-co-lead-and-transformer-co-author-joins-openai", "title": "Noam Shazeer, Google Gemini Co-Lead and Transformer Co-Author, Joins OpenAI", "summary": "Noam Shazeer, vice president of engineering at Google and co-lead of its Gemini AI models, announced he is leaving Google to join OpenAI. Shazeer, a co-author of the seminal \"Attention Is All You Need\" paper that introduced the transformer architecture, returned to Google in 2024 as part of a $2.7 billion deal involving his startup Character.AI. His departure underscores the intense talent competition among frontier AI labs.", "body_md": "# Noam Shazeer, Google Gemini Co-Lead and Transformer Co-Author, Joins OpenAI\n\nNoam Shazeer, vice president of engineering at Google and co-lead of its Gemini AI models, announced on X that he is leaving Google to join OpenAI.\n\nIn his post, Shazeer [wrote](https://x.com/NoamShazeer/status/2067400851438932297):\n\n“I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there. It was a difficult decision to move on. I’m incredibly proud of the amazing team at Google and everything we’ve built together. It has been an honor and a pleasure to work with all of you.”\n\nThe move comes less than two years after Google brought Shazeer back in August 2024 as part of a reported $2.7 billion deal that also included licensing technology and bringing over a team of researchers from Character.AI, the startup he co-founded after previously leaving Google in 2021.\n\n### Background and Role\n\nAs reported by Reuters, Shazeer [joined](https://www.reuters.com/technology/googles-gemini-co-lead-noam-shazeer-join-openai-2026-06-18/) Google in 2000. He is a co-author of the seminal 2017 “Attention Is All You Need” paper that introduced the transformer architecture and helped catalyze the current AI boom. At Google, he was appointed co-lead of Gemini development in 2024 and has been credited as a key figure in helping Gemini close the performance gap with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.\n\nThe departure underscores the ongoing high-stakes talent competition among frontier AI labs as companies race to advance model capabilities.\n\n### Actions to Take\n\n**Talent and org watchers at frontier labs and AI-native companies**: Track follow-on moves from the Gemini team. Shazeer’s exit as co-lead of a major model effort often precedes additional researcher or engineering departures in these environments.\n\n**Enterprise AI strategy teams**: Re-evaluate reliance on any single lab’s model roadmap. A high-profile architecture lead move like this can accelerate internal debates about multi-model strategies or building more proprietary scaffolding around base models.\n\n**Investors and acquirers evaluating AI talent moats**: Factor the $2.7B Character.AI return cost into retention math. Short tenure at this level (under two years post-return) highlights how expensive and fragile top-tier model architecture talent remains.\n\n**Compute allocation and roadmap planners**: Watch for any public signals on whether Shazeer’s new role at OpenAI involves architecture or pre-training leadership. Such moves frequently correlate with shifts in training cluster priorities or new model family direction at the destination lab.\n\n**Competitive intelligence teams**: Monitor OpenAI’s next model releases and technical reports for any architectural or scaling innovations that align with Shazeer’s known areas of expertise (transformers, mixture-of-experts, efficient architectures).\n\nThis is one of the more significant single-researcher moves in the current cycle given Shazeer’s foundational contributions and recent role running one of Google’s flagship model efforts.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/noam-shazeer-google-gemini-co-lead-and-transformer-co-author-joins-openai", "canonical_source": "https://www.narracomm.com/noam-shazeer-google-gemini-co-lead-and-transformer-co-author-joins-openai/", "published_at": "2026-06-18 17:45:42+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-18 18:11:12.889662+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models", "ai-research", "ai-startups", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Noam Shazeer", "Google", "OpenAI", "Gemini", "Character.AI", "ChatGPT", "Reuters"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/noam-shazeer-google-gemini-co-lead-and-transformer-co-author-joins-openai", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/noam-shazeer-google-gemini-co-lead-and-transformer-co-author-joins-openai.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/noam-shazeer-google-gemini-co-lead-and-transformer-co-author-joins-openai.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/noam-shazeer-google-gemini-co-lead-and-transformer-co-author-joins-openai.jsonld"}}