Noam Shazeer Leaves Google DeepMind for OpenAI in the Biggest AI Talent Move of the Year
The co-author of the original Transformer paper and a driving force behind Google's Gemini models has defected to OpenAI, signaling a dramatic escalation in the frontier AI talent war.
Noam Shazeer, one of the most consequential researchers in modern AI, has left Google DeepMind to join OpenAI. The move, which surfaced across multiple AI briefings on Thursday, represents what may be the single most significant individual talent transfer in the industry since Ilya Sutskever's departure from OpenAI in 2024. Shazeer is a co-author of the landmark 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which introduced the Transformer architecture underpinning virtually every frontier model in production today.
Shazeer's history with Google runs deep and complicated. He co-founded Character.AI in 2021, left Google to build it, then returned to Google DeepMind in 2024 as part of a reported $2.7 billion licensing deal that effectively brought him and co-founder Daniel De Freitas back into the fold. At Google, he played a central role in the Gemini model family. His decision to leave — again — suggests something more than a standard recruiting win for OpenAI. As @yo123dawg noted, Shazeer is "one of the most influential researchers behind modern LLMs," and his departure leaves a visible gap in Google's research leadership.
Get our free daily newsletter
Get this article free — plus the lead story every day — delivered to your inbox.
Want every article and the full archive? Upgrade anytime.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.