An IT executive changing jobs usually attracts little attention outside a narrow group of people, but Noam Shazeer’s move from Google to OpenAI is as momentous as any high-value soccer transfer.
He announced the news in a post on X: “I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there.”
Shazeer initially achieved fame as one of the eight co-authors of the influential AI paper Attention Is All You Need, published when he was working at Google Brain. He is also one of the creators of the transformer technology that lies at the heart of modern AI models.
He left Google when the company failed to back his chatbot Meena and was tempted back when Google subsequently bought the company he founded, Character.AI, for $2.7 billion. That company achieved notoriety when it was sued by a grieving mother, who alleged that a Character.AI chatbot had contributed to her son’s death by suicide. The company subsequently settling out of court.
Shazeer has since been working as the co-lead on Google’s Gemini project. It’s not clear what role he will play at OpenAI, but hiring someone with his background shortly before the company’s IPO could be an attractive move for investors.