In 2024, Google paid $2.7 billion to bring Noam Shazeer back. Shazeer invented the transformer architecture, the foundation behind GPT, Gemini, and Claude. Google said: "We can't lose this person."
June 2026. Shazeer is leaving Google for OpenAI.
This isn't one person's story. It's a pattern. Google DeepMind's best researchers are walking out the door to AI startups, one by one.
Who Left?
Noam Shazeer — The man who invented the transformer. Co-lead of Google's Gemini model. Google paid $2.7 billion to buy him back from Character.AI. Now joining OpenAI. (, , )
Ruoming Pang — Meta hired him for $200 million to lead their Superintelligence team. He jumped to OpenAI after just 7 months. ()
9 of 12 xAI co-founders — Left Musk's AI lab. ()
At startups? Start an experiment today. Fail tomorrow. Try again. Nobody's stopping you.
OpenAI and Anthropic have another card to play — equity. Google has RSUs, but startup equity can be worth far more. OpenAI has filed for a US IPO, targeting a valuation of up to $1 trillion. Early equity holders could see massive payouts. ()
What Is Google Doing?
Google isn't sitting still.
1. Throwing money at retention
They paid $2.7 billion to bring Shazeer back. Two years later, he left again. Money can't hold people.
2. Compute advantage
Google has massive GPU clusters. Startups don't. But the LA Times report suggests even Google's compute advantage is causing internal friction — too many teams competing for the same resources.
3. Product momentum
Despite the exodus, Google's AI products remain strong. Gemini 2.5 is competitive. DeepMind continues publishing breakthrough research. Accenture recently expanded its partnership with Google Cloud for enterprise AI using Gemini. (
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