This one stings for Google: Noam Shazeer, the company’s VP of Engineering and one of the two people leading Gemini, is leaving — for OpenAI of all places.
Who is Shazeer?
Shazeer isn’t just anyone. He co-authored the legendary 2017 “Attention Is All You Need” paper that introduced the Transformer architecture — the foundation of practically every large language model you use today. Claude, GPT, Gemini — they all build on his work.
In 2021, he left Google because the company wasn’t pursuing his chatbot vision aggressively enough. Together with Daniel De Freitas, he founded Character.AI. In August 2024, Google brought both of them back as part of a deal that effectively gutted Character.AI.
Less than two years, and he’s out again
Not even two years after his return, Shazeer is already gone. “I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining OpenAI,” he wrote on X. No further details.
The timing isn’t a coincidence. OpenAI just confidentially filed their IPO paperwork with the SEC. Having Shazeer on board is an enormous signal to investors. The man literally co-invented the architecture the entire industry runs on.
The talent war gets personal
For Google, this is a blow. Shazeer was one of the most important technical minds behind Gemini. His departure fits a pattern: the best AI researchers keep jumping between the big three — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google — like it’s a merry-go-round.
Just last month, Andrej Karpathy (also an OpenAI co-founder) joined Anthropic. Now OpenAI recruits Google’s Transformer legend. The talent market for frontier AI researchers might be the most competitive battlefield in tech right now.
What it means for us
Short-term: not much. Gemini won’t get worse overnight, and OpenAI won’t get better overnight. But long-term, talent is everything. And OpenAI just landed one of the most influential AI researchers alive.
The real question: what does OpenAI offer that Google couldn’t? Shazeer had virtually unlimited resources at Google and co-led Gemini. That it wasn’t enough says a lot about Google’s internal dynamics — and about the gravitational pull OpenAI has right now.
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