Google AI leader Noam Shazeer leaves company for OpenAI

Noam Shazeer is leaving Google to join OpenAI, marking a significant move in the ongoing AI talent competition. Shazeer, who previously co-led Google's Gemini AI efforts and was instrumental in its development, announced his departure on X. He had returned to Google in 2024 after co-founding the chatbot startup Character.AI in 2021, which was valued at $1 billion during its Series A funding round. Shazeer's departure from Google follows a period where Character.AI settled lawsuits concerning teen mental health harms. His contributions to AI are foundational, including co-authoring the 2017 research paper "Attention is All You Need," which introduced the transformer architecture powering most large language models. This move highlights the intense competition among AI labs to secure top researchers, with companies like Meta and Microsoft also actively recruiting talent from competitors. OpenAI has previously hired sales and go-to-market professionals from companies such as Slack, Salesforce, and Snowflake, while Microsoft hired engineers and researchers from Google DeepMind.