Noam Shazeer, technical co-lead of the Google Gemini project and vice president of engineering, announced that he will leave Google and join the artificial intelligence company OpenAI, once again arousing the industry's attention to the flow of top AI talents. Noam Shazeer is one of the main co-authors of the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which first proposed the Transformer architecture that now supports almost all large language models and is regarded as one of the key starting points for the wave of generative artificial intelligence.
Previously, he participated in a number of important AI projects at Google, including the conversation model LaMDA, and in 2016 published the Sparsely-gated Mixture of Experts paper that attracted much attention in the AI community. In 2021, he left Google and co-founded the conversational AI startup Character.AI.
Under the impact of emerging forces such as OpenAI and Anthropic, Google was once considered "half a step behind" in the large model competition in recent years. In order to regroup, Google reached an important deal with Character.AI in 2024, bringing Noam Shazeer and a number of researchers back to Google DeepMind, and making him the vice president of engineering and technical co-lead of the Gemini project. This is also regarded as a high-cost and heavyweight talent repurchase action by Google in its AI strategy.
However, on June 18, 2026, Noam Shazeer announced on social platform X that he would leave Google and join OpenAI. He said in the post that this was a "difficult decision" and expressed his sincere pride and gratitude to the Google team and the results they have achieved together in the past few years. He said that working with Google colleagues is an honor and a pleasant experience.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also posted a message on X to publicly welcome this major addition. Altman said Noam Shazeer was "one of the people he most wanted to work with" since the inception of OpenAI, and now "it's taken 10 years to wait for this day" and said the wait "will be worth it."
In the past year, Google has significantly accelerated its progress in Gemini and related products, gradually narrowing the gap with OpenAI in multiple dimensions. It is generally believed that it has made significant progress in multi-modal capabilities and integrated experience. However, the loss of Noam Shazeer again less than two years after the heavy investment was regarded as a major setback for Google in the layout of AI talents. It also highlighted the fierce competition for top researchers in the current large model field.
For OpenAI, the addition of Noam Shazeer means that there is an additional heavyweight scholar with extremely rich experience in language models and architecture design on the team. His previous research on Transformer, Mixture of Experts and other directions has been widely used in mainstream large models in the industry, and is expected to provide OpenAI with deeper algorithm and system-level innovation support in the development of ChatGPT, Codex and next-generation cutting-edge models.